6
Cooperation

You are a passenger in a car driven by a close friend, and your close friend's car hits a pedestrian. You know that your friend was going at least 35 mph in an area where the maximum speed was 20 mph. There are no witnesses. Your friend's lawyer says that if you testify under oath that their speed was only 20 mph then you may save your friend from any serious consequences. What would you do? Would you lie to protect your friend? What right does your friend have to expect your help? On the other hand, what are your obligations to society to uphold the law?

When people around the world were asked this question, their answers differed dramatically. The majority of Koreans, Russians, and Chinese said that they would lie for their friend. But over 90% of Swiss, Canadians, Americans, Swedes, Brits, and Dutch said that the friend has no or only some right to expect support and that they would not help.

Impartiality and rule of law are two of the many norms that are essential to well-functioning democratic institutions. When a country discovers the all-too-common phenomenon of a corrupt leader absconding with billions in national funds that could instead have been used to build better schools, hospitals, and roads, they question why less-corrupt leaders can't be found. But corruption is not a function of bad leaders that can be replaced by better leaders; it's a function of entire cultures where the same behavior of favoring friends, family, and close connections occurs at every scale: from the manager giving her friend a job, to an official allowing a connection to skip the usual bureaucratic process, to the minister giving his nephew a government contract. The difference here is not in the behavior but in the scale of the implications.

Even within Europe, we can see differences in impartiality from surveys of the method people used to find their current job. In Switzerland, Germany, and Norway, people primarily found jobs through job adverts. Job adverts level the playing field and create a larger, fairer competition by being available to all. In contrast, in Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain, which are all higher in corruption, people primarily found their job through friends and family.

Norms such as individualism and impartiality rather than familial obligations co-evolved with democratic institutions, largely in Europe. But as these within-Europe results make stark, they are hard to fully implement and countries are always in danger of slipping back to these more natural, lower scales of cooperation. This is also why it's such a challenge to try to export democratic institutions and fairer, impartial, non-family corporations to places around the world that lack these necessary norms.

Liberia, for example, founded by formerly enslaved Americans, took more than its flag from the United States, but is now by almost all metrics on the other end of the spectrum in the strength of its democracy, human development, corruption, and violence. The institutions alone were never enough. You also need those prerequisite cultural pillars. But like Wallace's water, those pillars are invisible to those from successful, less-corrupt countries. Unless you've lived in a country without these pillars, it's hard to fathom the difference in psychology, norms, and institutions. This failure to understand the diversity of people, how they handle relationships, and the different normative obligations in other nations has had disastrous consequences for foreign policy. Take, for example, the failure to transplant democratic institutions to Afghanistan.

Source: ‘The World's Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society’, Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. (2013), https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-overview/

Lessons from Afghanistan

In the wake of the 2021 Taliban takeover of Kabul, President Biden defended his decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan saying, ‘We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.’ But did Biden really understand what type of future Afghan people actually wanted? The little data we have, supported by deeper historical context, suggests that it was not the one imagined by those in charge of US foreign policy.

The United States occupied Afghanistan in 2001. At the height of this occupation, in 2013, a Pew poll suggested that 99% of Afghans favored making sharia the official law of the land – a figure much higher than any other Muslim country.

But the word ‘sharia’ simply refers to Islamic law and can mean different things to different people. So what did the specific policy questions tell us?

81% of Afghans favor corporal punishment, such as lashings and cutting off hands, for theft.

84% favor stoning as the punishment for adultery.

79% favor a death penalty for leaving Islam.

Pew claimed the data was representative of the population, but in certain areas women were under-represented. It is possible that even if the interviewer were a woman interviewing an Afghani woman with no man present, women may nonetheless have answered with the perceived norm, as may have Afghani men. And neither men nor women may have had a good concept of alternative laws and norms. Indeed, in larger cities, we can see more (though still a minority) of women lobbying for greater rights. On the other hand, these numbers from Afghanistan are not small majorities. And moreover, many other norms and conditions in Afghanistan also pose challenges to successful democratic institutions.

Afghanistan, a nation of over a dozen tribes with different languages and histories, cooperates primarily at the level of kin. People rely on their kin for survival through support and favors. Afghanis even marry among their extended family – the rate of cousin marriage in the country is 46%. Kin-based obligations undermine the kind of impartial institutions that liberal democracies require. Instead, partisan, tribe-based politics dominates. It becomes critical that your person and not necessarily the best person is in charge. These dynamics unsurprisingly undermine good decision-making. And unfortunately, these norms are self-sustaining.

People rely on their friends and family and place great importance on these relationships, because they can't rely on governments and other institutions to support them. In such places, people prefer cash, take loans from family rather than banks, and are less likely to engage in broadly pro-social altruism such as donating blood or impartial charitable donations to strangers. For many in such places, charity starts at home, but that's also where it ends. These countries are trapped in a self-sustaining equilibrium that prevents them from reaching higher scales of cooperation.

The aforementioned Afghani data can be hard to understand let alone accept if we've never met people who hold such views. When this data is shared with people in WEIRD countries, it is often met with instinctive incredulity and sometimes moral outrage at the idea of such cultural differences. The very idea that people might want something so drastically different to WEIRD sensibilities sometimes invites patronizing and paternalistic attitudes – that people in other societies just don't know better. Regardless, this attitude contributes to failed foreign policies in these distantly different cultural contexts. If you read this section with surprise or incredulity consider that even if one accepts a diluted version of the data, the point still stands – the rights and rules commonly found in WEIRD societies may not be what everyone everywhere wants. And successful foreign policy requires full understanding of the norms and values of people in other nations. But of course, even if we narrowly focus on economic development, the WEIRD package of norms and institutions may not be the only one that works for large-scale cooperation and economic development. The law of evolution just happened to discover these ways of cooperating as an adjacent possible of Europe's specific historical trajectory, as we will see in the next chapter. In other words, other solutions are also possible. Many nations, most notably those in Asia, have borrowed and recombined elements of successful WEIRD institutions and adapted them to local cultures and circumstances.

South Korea, for example, has successfully and in their own way integrated WEIRD-style corporations and institutions. Hong Kong, as a former British colony, was an engine of development for China and is culturally halfway between China and Britain. These examples represent WEIRD-style corporations and constitutions tailored to more collectivist cultures. The overall message is that cooperation and conflict are two sides of the same coin.

As novelist Nafisa Haji quoting an ancient Arabic proverb put it, ‘I, against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I and my brothers and my cousins against the world.’ This is the evolutionary dance between cooperation and competition, the duality of the human condition.

Humans cooperate in groups – overlapping and embedded within one another – and then these groups sometimes cooperate and sometimes compete, depending on contexts and conditions. It is through strong competition in the presence of large energy sources that higher scales of cooperation are reached. The mechanism by which this happens is called cultural-group selection.

Cultural-group selection

Cultural-group selection describes competition between cultural-groups, which are defined as groups of cultural traits rather than groups of people who possess those traits, because people can change and acquire different traits over their lifetime. I use a dash in cultural-group to avoid ambiguity and the mistaken view that we are referring to some cultural form of group selection on groups of people. These cultural traits might include belief in democracy, female empowerment, hard work, arriving on time, giving to charity, which sports should get more funding, and much more. It requires a psychology to represent normative behavior, a psychology of reputation to reward those who follow norms and punish those who do not, and a psychology to identify groups and subgroups who may have different norms.

In the strictest version of cultural-group selection there may be a perfect overlap between the cultural-group of traits and the group of people, such as in an ethno-linguistic group. A small New Guinean tribe's unique beliefs may be completely correlated with its unique language. But this is rare. In most cases, we belong to multiple overlapping and embedded cultural-groups. For example, cultural-groups of liberal democracies and of shared religions; of Googlers and of Department of Defense employees. There are British Catholics and Spanish Catholics; Americans who are also New Yorkers; Amazon employees who span the globe.

There are a few well-studied mechanisms by which these groups compete, though there are probably many more yet to be discovered. The best-studied mechanisms include the following:

Direct competition: Groups outcompete one another through conflict or simply surviving at the expense of another group – e.g. war or corporate bankruptcy.

Selective, assortative migration: Individuals carrying cultural traits move to some places at a greater rate than others – e.g. more people move from South Africa to North America than vice versa. America as a cultural-group will grow at the expense of South Africa to the same degree these migrants or their descendants acculturate to dominant American values. If these migrants don't acculturate but instead change the local culture – perhaps South Africans Trevor Noah and Elon Musk brought values, norms, beliefs or behaviors that other Americans now embody – then they represent cultural mutation or recombination (think Hawaiian pizzas). If they segregate as separate communities, a satellite to their group of origin, then they represent a smaller cultural-group, potentially competing within a larger one. If you choose to work for one company over another or people choose to stay or leave during a merger or acquisition, these too are examples of selective, assortative migration.

Demographic swamping: Some groups grow faster than others. For example, agriculturalists at the expense of hunters and gatherers; pro-fertility religions emphasizing large families at the expense of religions that did not emphasize fertility; companies that secure more investment or larger profits.

Prestige-biased cultural-group selection: Groups copy the cultural traits of more successful or prestigious groups en masse. For example, Americanization or Westernization of many traditional communities, or the spread of hip-hop culture beyond its African American origins. Watching a Japanese hip-hop crew in Tokyo, I was struck that they had not only absorbed the musical style but also the hairstyles and fashion. And of course, companies borrowing policies and practices from more successful companies.