M.M. Anthropologists tend to find that cooperation is supportable in small
groups but in large groups it’s very hard to do. How can we teach people
to learn to support each other?
G.C.
As a matter of fact the
experiment is not about
teaching how people
can mutually support
so it is a sort of speculative comment that I
can make at this point
from other experiments
that we’ve done, the
important thing is to
make sure that individuals are made in their
head responsible, at an
individual level, for the
actions they’ve taken.
So what we’ve found out
is that communication
among individuals, and
in particular, information about the actions
that the individual has
taken in the past, can
help those who have
inclinations to behave
opportunistically but is
doing something that is
not very nice, for personal gain, this type of
behavior gets tremen-
dously reduced, but you
need to have the bit to
first communicate, to
know and to talk to
each other, directly if
possible, and second to
have information about
what individuals have
done. Third, you have
to have the possibility
of sustaining punishment if someone does
not behave in a way
that is socially supportive, society has to pro36
vide disincentives, has
to remove incentives,
from doing that type of
behavior.
So anyone seeing the
experiments we’ve tried
with prisoner’s dilemmas, anyone who’s
been subject to this
type of environment in
which they can communicate with others,
in which they can track
each other’s factions