Cooperation and Conflict

The need to achieve stability and security in Europe has been a core motivation for European Union actors in their decision in favour of enlargement, calling for new measures to advance the enlargement pro-cess. EU leaders have often justified changes to the existing enlarge-ment strategy by making reference to threats to security in Europe and by claiming that eastern enlargement could be the way to attain peace and security in Europe. Never has EU enlargement been so frequently connected with security debates. The overall effect of security concerns on the enlargement process, however, has not been adequately ana-lysed in previous studies of EU enlargement; enlargement policy has largely been explained from economic and commercial viewpoints.This article explores the role of security concerns in EU enlargement — ‘security ’ that does not necessarily come in the military form, but in what I refer to as a ‘speech act’, drawing on insights from the Copenhagen School of security studi...

Leonardelli, Pickett, Joseph and Hess integrate Brewer’s (1991) optimal distinctiveness theory with the nested categorical context typically descriptive of an organization’s internal structure, where individuals belong to groups (subgroups) nested within more inclusive superordinate groups (such as functional units nested within an organization). It is ideal for employees to simultaneously identify with the subgroup and superordinate group, that is, to engage what is called a “dual identity,” as doing so aligns the loyalty and the interests of subgroup members with the superordinate group as a whole. However, the authors first review evidence that individuals identify more with the subgroup and less with the superordinate group, what the authors call “dueling identities,” because individuals prefer the more distinctive subgroups to superordinate groups. The authors then argue that such dueling identities can be transformed into a dual identity were the subgroup and superordinate group both perceived to be optimally distinctive, a prediction possible if intergroup distinctiveness is determined by what the authors call "horizontal" rather than "vertical" social comparisons. Some evidence is presented that supports this conclusion and the discussion highlights the different strategies that could be implemented to engineer a dual identity by manipulating individuals’ needs for optimal distinctiveness.

Research indicates that cultures differ in the ways they approach social conflicts, with Japanese being more motivated to maintain interpersonal harmony and avoid conflicts than Americans. Such cultural differences have developmental consequences for reasoning about social conflict. We interviewed random samples of Americans from the Midwest in the U.S. and Japanese from the larger Tokyo area about the future developments of intergroup and interpersonal conflicts. Responses showed increased wisdom (e.g. recognition of multiple perspectives, compromise, and the limits of knowledge) with increasing age among Americans, but older age was not associated with wiser responses among Japanese. Younger and middle-aged Japanese showed greater use of wise reasoning strategies than younger and middle-aged Americans. This cultural difference was weaker for older participants for interpersonal conflicts and was actually reversed for intergroup conflicts. Implications of this research for the study of aging, cultural psychology, and wisdom are discussed.

This article reports a meta-analysis of 82 studies assessing the relationship between social value orientation (SVO) and cooperation in social dilemmas. A significant and small to medium effect size was found (r = .30). Results supported a hypothesis that the effect size was larger when participants were not paid (r = .39) than when they were paid (r = .23). The effect size was also larger in give-some (r = .29) as opposed to take-some (r = .22) games. However, contrary to expectations, the effect was not larger in one-shot, as opposed to iterated games. Findings are discussed in the context of theory on SVO and directions for future research are outlined.

Male reproductive cooperation is rare in nature: expectations from evolutionary theory suggest that males should be competitors for reproductive opportunities and provide little parental care. Counter to this expectation, in cooperatively polyandrous mating systems, multiple adult males mate with a single breeding female and subsequently cooperate to rear her young. This raises the question of the fitness benefits of parental care, as males may be providing care to offspring that are not their own. Here, I use genetic and demographic data from a multiyear field study of Geoffroy’s tamarin, Saguinus geoffroyi, to test predictions of the indirect and direct fitness benefits hypotheses. I found that polyandrous males within a group were related at levels consistent with filial or fraternal relationships (r = 0.36–0.44) and could also share paternity (40% of groups had >2 male sires). Sharing of paternity occurred both within litters and over multiyear associations that remained stable throughout the study period of 2–3 years. However, remaining groups had a single sire, perhaps owing to the ability of males to prevail in sperm competition. These results suggest the joint role of indirect and direct fitness benefits in male–male cooperation in tamarins, in contrast to other cooperatively polyandrous species. The high average relatedness of polyandrous males may be consistent with fraternal cooperative polyandry in this species, as observed in certain human societies, providing a novel example that should enhance comparative studies of the evolution of male–male cooperation in reproduction.

How effective are rewards (for cooperation) and punishment (for noncooperation) as tools to promote cooperation in social dilemmas, or situations when immediate self-interest and longer-term collective interest conflict? And what variables can promote the impact of these incentives? Although such questions have been examined, social and behavioral scientists provide different answers. To date, there is no theoretical and/or quantitative review of rewards and punishments as incentives of cooperation in social dilemmas. Using a novel interdependence-theoretic framework, we propose that rewards and punishment should both promote cooperation, and identify two variables – cost of incentives and source of incentives – that are predicted to magnify the effectiveness of these incentives in promoting cooperation. A meta-analysis involving 187 effect sizes, revealed that rewards and punishments exhibit a statistically equivalent positive effect on cooperation (d = .51 and .70, respectively). The effectiveness of incentives was stronger when the incentives were costly, compared to free, to administer. Centralization of incentives did not moderate the effect size. Punishments were also more effective during iterated dilemmas when participants continued to interact in the same group, compared to both iterated dilemmas with re-assignment to a new group after each trial and one-shot dilemmas. We also examine several other potential moderators of the effect size, such as iterations, partner matching, group size, country, and participant payment. We discuss broad conclusions, implications for theory, and suggest directions for future research on rewards and punishment in social dilemmas.

Amongst the most researched solutions to social dilemmas is communication. Since the late 1950’s, it has been well known that communication enhances cooperation in social dilemmas. This paper reports a meta-analysis of this literature (45 effect sizes) and finds a large positive effect of communication on cooperation in social dilemmas (d = 1.01). This effect is moderated by the type of communication, with a stronger effect of face-to-face discussion (d = 1.21) compared to written messages (d = .46). The communication-cooperation relationship is also stronger in larger, compared to smaller, group social dilemmas. Whether communication occurred before or during iterated dilemmas did not statistically affect the communication-cooperation effect size. Results are discussed according to theory and research on communication in social dilemmas.

[AMAZON LINK BELOW TO BOOK ITSELF -- TOC and book summary in downloadable .doc]      Our instincts—for food, sex, or territorial protection— evolved for life on the savannah 10,000 years ago, not in today’s world of densely populated cities, technological innovations, and pollution. We now have access to a glut of larger-than-life objects, from candy to pornography to atomic weapons—that gratify these gut instincts with often-dangerous results. Animal biologists coined the term “supernormal stimuli” to describe imitations that appeal to primitive instincts and exert a stronger pull than real things, such as soccer balls that geese prefer over eggs. Evolutionary psychologist Deirdre Barrett applies this concept to the alarming disconnect between human instinct and our created environment, demonstrating how supernormal stimuli are a major cause of today’s most pressing problems, including obesity and war. However, Barrett does more than show how unfettered instincts fuel dangerous excesses. She also reminds us that by exercising self-control we can rein them in, potentially saving ourselves and civilization.

Even though I coordinate an adolescent leadership training program based on cooperative values, I realized that I meant something different with these two words – cooperative leadership. The program was not only about acquiring values, but about a completely different way of approaching leadership and social development. Then, two things happened: first, one of the trainers told me that it was impossible to think of leadership without an individual leader; then, one of my fellow wasanies asked me what I meant by “cooperative leadership”.

Since then, I have been thinking about it, and this article tries to show some starting points of that journey.

Social scientists and folk views have long had it that there is an association between religiosity and prosocial behaviour, but hard evidence for such a relationship is limited. Studies show that religiosity is correlated with self-reported prosociality, however this relationship is not very clear when it comes to observed prosocial behaviours. Experimental studies reveal a link between religious priming and prosocial behaviours, and remarkably such effects hold irrespectively of degrees of religiosity. Building on and combining the strengths of previous field designs, I report here the results of a field experiment in Mauritius examining the effects of religious environments on cooperation in a naturalistic setting. These results were consistent with previous findings that religious cues may increase cooperation. Importantly, this effect was not dependent on degrees of prior religiosity. Plausible interpretations of such effects are discussed.

The explication of altruistic behavior in primates remains complex. Gregarious, socially complex primates are characterized by a diverse array of social behavior patterns with seemingly altruistic behavior being relatively commonplace. Human societies are a form of primate society but with much higher levels of social complexity and extremely high levels of cooperative and apparently altruistic behavior. It is likely that there are elements of primate (at least anthropoid) sociality that act as baseline for subsequent expansion and elaboration during human evolution. Can understanding patterns and contexts of primate social complexity and cooperation help us understand human altruism? In this chapter we have two primary objectives: to examine three non-human primate genera to show how social cooperation, social bonding, and niche construction can affect our understandings of altruism, and to illustrate where we think that such non-human primate information is a good model for humans, and where it is not.

While inter-personal conflicts have attracted much attention from scholars and practitioners over the last two decades, our understanding of inter-organizational conflicts remains limited. This paper critically assesses current literature on inter-organizational conflicts. We first discuss the specific features of conflicts at the inter-organizational level. Second, we provide an overview of both qualitative and quantitative research conducted in the field. Third, we make suggestions for future research on inter-organizational conflicts. We specifically suggest opportunities to develop theoretical bridges with other streams of literature and to build multi-level models of conflict management. We then discuss important empirical issues associated with doing research on conflicts between organizations and provide recommendations to overcome these challenges.

The organizers are seeking papers from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and theoretical approaches addressing one or more of the following topics: Prehistoric/historic/contemporary warfare, ritual violence, biodiversity, natural resource utilization, past and present cases of environmental degradation/sustainability, egalitarianism, advent of social complexity, social inequality, conflict resolution, and prosocial behavior from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives.

Although cooperation between groups is not unusual, most forms of human cooperation are in-group bounded and, sometimes, motivated by the desire to ward-off and subordinate rivaling out-groups. Building on evolutionary perspectives and models, we propose that humans evolved a capacity for parochial cooperation, which entails (i) in-group love: the tendency to cooperate with and extend trust towards others that are similar, that are familiar rather than unfamiliar, and that belong to one’s own group, and (ii) out-group hate: a willingness to fight against rivaling out-groups. This chapter reviews our own work, and that of others, showing that parochial cooperation (i) emerges especially when it benefits individuals’ within-group reputation, (ii) affects one’s within-group status, (iii) is more prominent among individuals with chronic pro-social rather than pro-self value orientation, and (iv) is sustained and motivated by oxytocin, an evolutionary ancient hypothalamic neuropeptide pivotal in social bonding, pair-bond formation, and empathic responding. Across the board, findings resonate well with relatively recent evolutionary theory on (inter)group relations and add to classic theory in social psychology.

This file contains the PowerPoint slides I used for my presentation of my paper, "A Complex Systems Landscape: Recognizing What's Important in World History," which I presented at the recent World History Association Conference in Bilbao, Spain (24 June 2022). In order to understand the slides, you must also have a copy of the paper, which tracks the slides. The paper is also available on my Academia page.

Paper for the World History Association conference, Bilbao, Spain, 23-25 June 2022, as part of session D1, Databases for World Historical Information about Distance, Mobility, and Migration (Friday, 24 June, 16.30-18.00). This paper introduces a metaphor/model for a world history greater than the sum of its parts. The metaphor guides us to the necessary historical information and suggests the sort of database required for its representation.
I base this metaphor on a pair of linked visualizations created by theoretical biologist C. H. Waddington (1905-1975) to model the morphogenesis of tissues and organs from a fertilized egg. The first illustration displays the landscape, a surface with hills and valleys through which a ball rolls, representing the process. The second illustration reveals from below that the landscape’s features are the expression of genes, which are linked together by strings.
I use the first illustration to represent a complex, nonlinear, human system in which the various features respond to variables with which the ball (some historical process) interacts as it rolls in time through the space. From below, Waddington’s genes are now system variables, still connected by strings so that perturbations in a variable will be communicated to other variables, altering the landscape and the ball’s path. A few of the variables, called “control variables,” are always near instability, and if one or more of them becomes unstable, the entire system enters a “phase transition” out of which a new human system emerges. To understand the historical processes, we require narrative knowledge, with which, for clarity, the paper will tie the metaphor to historical examples drawn from the First Global Age, 1400-1800. The PowerPoint and reading version of the paper will be uploaded after the session.

In this paper it is proposed that a central topic of inquiry in the study of social knowledge should be the clarification of the conditions of communication that are likely to lead to the attainment of knowledge rather than to the transmission of belief. Insights and empirical evidence from social developmental psychology are presented that shed light on this issue. It is argued that social relations established between the partners in communication in the form of different conversation types are differentially linked to representations of an object based on the construction of new knowledge or transmission of beliefs. A central mechanism that constrains or enables the establishment of particular conversation types is social recognition, as this is manifested in different behavioural styles in communication.

We argue that recent game theoretic approaches to social norms differ on some fundamental issues, our focus being on recent accounts by Ken Binmore and Cristina Bicchieri. After a brief introduction, we present the deepest cause for their disagreement, namely whether the action of norms should be modelled as a one-shot game, the option favoured by Bicchieri, or by a repeated game, as Binmore does. Although these choices appear to leave room for the two accounts to be complementary, we then argue that this is not possible. First, differing attitudes to modelling punishment, a central feature of all informal work on social norms, prevent any straightforward integration of the two theories. Second, the solution cannot consist in merely choosing between the two accounts, as they both fail to deal with the way in which triggered norms depend on context, in static as well as diachronic frameworks.

In investigating Dewey’s theory of the Great community, it is important to first examine closely Dewey’s theory of scientific inquiry and show how it evades the spectator theory of knowledge common to all modern epistemologies as closed systems. Dewey maintained that through controlled experimentalism we engage, and can solve, existential issues facing us for the purpose of expanding human freedom, promoting the democratic way of life and cultivating the institutions which foster these activities. The usage of inquiry to overcome problematic situations therefore stands as one of the first conditions needed to attain the great community.

Since Dewey did not view human beings as isolated and passive
spectators he engaged in formulating what it means to become an individual with experimental habits. Dewey envisioned humans as organisms operating in a common cultural environment rather than private entities cut off from one another. We are communal by way of communication. The next condition required to bring about the great community is open communication.

Dewey held that human beings need to operate through the development of such habits that assist them in overcoming obstacles by means of an education that secures the process of cultural growth. This aspect of his theory became the backbone of Dewey’s conception of ethical value and his political theory. Members of the Great community must trust and freely associate to accomplish the social growth that Dewey advocates therefore free association is another condition for the achievability of the great community.

As I argue, for Dewey, any way of life which is oriented toward individual growth can be democratic. A democratic way of life is shown to be superior to any other currently pursued. Thus, any community which cultivates democratic practices throughout its culture can become a participant in the great community. By so doing it allows the individuals of that community to flourish as ethical and cognitive agents. Therefore democracy as a way of life requires that individuals participate within the cultivation of themselves and their community and this is the next condition for achieving the great community

The final condition for achieving the great community is the full integration and usage of individual’s potentialities. If these six conditions are met, Dewey held the conditions would be ripe to bring about a great community. He never completed the social task of what the great community would be once attained,
but this dissertation will gather together the materials he did provide on it and trace the steps that would be needed to achieve it..

Ideas about nonhuman primates have long been used to talk about human gender and aggression.  Due to phylogenetic relatedness and popular conceptions of similarities, behavioral studies of nonhuman primates have a much greater impact on ideas about human behavior than studies of other groups of organisms.  Because of our biological basis for shared traits resulting from a common evolutionary heritage, nonhuman primate behavior is often put forward as evidence of an underlying natural condition or of normative roles in human behavior. In recent years, the evidence for the diversity and complexity of nonhuman primate behavior has complicated the process of generalizing from primate to human behavior.  Yet, at the same time, certain reductionist accounts--stemming primarily from sociobiology and evolutionary psychology--have have found their way into popularized narratives that rely on analogies between primate and human behavior that have little basis in the evidence of primatology.  This chapter focuses on the tension between these two trends in the uses of primatology, particularly as they relate to discussions of male aggression and male dominance.

This briefing paper examines the challenges of cooperation and rivalry between major international organizations. By drawing on the EU-UN and EU-NATO dyads, it seeks to identify core conditions for a more successful, effective and integrative coordination and cooperation among major institutions.

Although humans strive to be wise, they often fail to do so when reasoning over issues that have profound personal implications. Here we test the hypothesis that psychological distance enhances wise reasoning, attitudes and behavior under such circumstances. Two experiments demonstrate that cueing people to reason about personally meaningful issues (Study 1: Career prospects for the unemployed during an economic recession; Study 2: Anticipated societal changes associated with one’s chosen candidate losing the 2008 United States presidential election) from a distanced perspective enhances wise reasoning (dialecticism; intellectual humility), attitudes (cooperation-related attitude assimilation) and behavior (willingness to join a bipartisan group).

Report on the TECT Conference at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria, 15-18 September 2009. Conference title: “Evolution of Cooperation: Models and Theories”; prepared especially for the nineteen core researchers of the TECT project “Dynamic complexity of self-organizing, cooperation-based commercial networks in the first global age”, who were excluded from participation by the collapse of TECT networking funds. The DynCoopNet Project within TECT focuses on cooperation within the networks linking the global domains of Iberian Monarchies during the First Global Age, 1400-1800.

The aim of this article is to analyse the reasons behind continuity and change in Turkey’s relations with Russia and to question the limits of cooperation between the two nations by using historical and current developments as cases. The article proposes that it would be misleading to take only into account certain recent cooperation points only, for instance in Syria, in order to reach for a better understanding about the nature of the relations. Instead, any attempt to understand the reasons for continuity and change in Turkey’s relations with Russia necessitates a framework built on conceptual and historical materials, as well as an analysis of conjunctural developments. Indeed, the history of the relations with Russia goes back to the emergence of the Russians in Euro-Asian region, but the relationship cannot be analysed without first understanding the mutual ontological concerns that both nations have had for centuries. As the Turks played an important role as the other in the construction of a Russian national identity, the rise of a Russian state in Euro-Asia became possible, to a great extent, with the decline of the Turks in this same region. The manuscript concludes that this historical reality that created a deep ontological concern particularly in Turkey still has the potential for renewed conflicts, despite of some recent cooperation with Moscow.