Cooperate? Compete? …Both?
Categories, like whether two people are cooperating with one another or competing against each other, are incredibly useful problem solving tools. However, solutions to problems are not to be confused with describing the nature of the problem itself. Solutions to problems are often finite and bounded; the problems they are solving are infinite and limitless. Dr. Robert Sapolsky, author or Behave, starts the book by warning the reader that applying bounds to anything that is naturally a continuous spectrum will almost always result in confusion.
Imagine, for example, trying to categorize the steps of how and why you understand the words you’re reading right now. Categorize these steps into 3 buckets: physics, biology and chemistry. The light radiation traveling from your screen to your pupil is clearly physics. How your pupil receives the LED light involves some physics too, but your optic nerve also relies on chemicals to communicate what you’re seeing to the brain. The brain receives and understands chemistry, but it’s part of your biology, right? Furthermore, your brain is interpreting the marks on your screen as English, which is then decoded as ideas. Which of the 3 categories does language interpretation fall under?
In life, there is no distinction between physics, biology or chemistry. There is no boundary where physics ends and biology begins, nor where biology ends and chemistry begins. The chaos of it all is happening all at once, constantly. Categories help us make sense of what is naturally chaotic.
Are We Meant to Be Cooperative or Competitive?
Another popular problem that categories help solve is determining how we, as humans, should distribute finite resources to infinite needs within our economies. This question is almost always framed as “should resources be distributed based on cooperation or competition?”
Asking whether nature is innately competitive or cooperative is still a well-intentioned attempt to invent categories that do not actually exist. Behave by Dr. Robert Sapolsky gives examples of times when chimps help each other, and there are also times when they literally rip each other’s faces off. We, humans, are not dissimilar. Both cooperation and competition is happening all at once, constantly.
And yet still, applying categories onto continuous spectrums is very useful for solving problems.
Economics, as Inspired by Biology
Behave made me think about a very pertinent problem — what are the rules for whether humanity should use cooperation or competition to perfectly distribute nature’s finite goods to our infinite needs?
Sapolsky had an entire chapter on how the behaviors from millennia ago influence our culture today, so I’ve been thinking about this question in terms of culture. My definition of culture is the following: a list of rules that an individual follows, with the expectation that adhering to these rules makes life more enjoyable for themselves and those they love. Assuming we are entertaining the existence of categories, there seems to be specific cultural problems for which cooperation is better suited to solve than competition, and vis versa.
A excerpt from “Centuries to Millennia Before”, the chapter in Behave that introduces the concept of collectivist v.s individualistic cultures, with my own personal notes scribbled on the pages.
Behave documents the neurobiology, psychology and anthropology of why humans are the way we are. We are not cooperative or competitive; we’re both. Nonetheless, these 2 categories are useful within biology for understanding when cultures can use cooperation or competition.
I’ll detail them with the following framework, which is inspired from what I’ve learned from reading Behave:
Cooperation is best for:
Preserving an existing culture
Extending an existing culture
Competition is best for:
Improving an existing culture
Depreciating a culture
Cooperation
From the perspective of a naive economics enthusiast like myself, cooperation seems to be treated as an edge case in how we speak about distributing resources. I notice that economic topics like “group economics”, “circular economy” or the “sharing economy” are usually discussed in an up-and-coming manner; unlike competitive economic concepts like “supply and demand” do. I find this odd, because cooperation is foundational to our biology.
In the context of cultures, biology uses cooperation to preserve or extend culture.
Preserving an Existing Culture
The preservation of a culture is dependent on the cooperation of all those who participate in it. A popular way of doing so is to use cooperation to discourage behavior that is contrary to the culture’s values. The behavior in question does not have to be one of perceived moral value, such as whether or not the culture sees dogs as friends or meat. Culture permeates to activities that are expected to be objective as well, such as solving a physics problem.
A study out of the University of Michigan by Richard Nisbett found that East Asians used the friction between the ball and the surface it was rolling on to explain the movement of a ball, whereas Westerners (Americans, Canadians, Western Europeans, etc.) used the momentum of the ball itself to explain the movement of the ball. The exact same ball is making the exact same movement in both scenarios; both cultures reach the exact same conclusion about predicting how the ball will move, but the differences in their culture caused differences in how East Asians and Westerners reached their respective conclusions. Different cultures have different ways of solving problems.
This is an example of a holistic or analytical culture. East Asians think holistically about the group that the subject belongs to. Westerns think analytically about the subject itself.
There’s also a very fascinating interview of the original author of the study about how culture plays into critical thinking! Check it out!
Cultures help solve problems in various ways. It makes sense to me why biology would use cooperation to preserve culture at all costs. After all, natural selection is all about efficiently solving life-or-death problems. One way biology has found a way to preserve an individual’s culture is to make it as stressful as possible to solve a problem using another culture’s technique. Americans secrete glucocorticoids (a stress hormone) when asked to recall a time someone influenced them and East Asians do the same when asked to recall a time they influenced someone.
Biology uses hormones to coerce a culture into submission.
Extending a Culture
What’s the point of preserving a culture if it does not eventually spread? Life is meant to beget more life! Cultures are no different.
Sapolsky tells the story of 7R variant of dopamine, which is documented to influence risk-taking and novelty-seeking. This gene variant occurred in 23% of European-Americans that were studied and 1% of East Asians.
It gets crazier. In North America and South America, the gene variant becomes more prevalent the further south one travels: a 40% incident rate in the Mayans of Central America, 55% in the northern parts of South America and a 70% incident rate in the Amazon basin.
Here’s a wild map I drew:
A gene variant in how the neurotransmitters in your brain receive dopamine helps predict if you traveled southwards in search of new adventure or if you stayed put with your tribe. This is an example of how genes help extend the gospel of a culture that seeks adventure and novelty.
This gene, coupled with the migration of Europeans to the Americas, makes the West bursting with a culture of individualism and adventure-seeking. When we built an entire economy on top of this biology, we invented a culture that perpetuates and extends itself. We are heavily incentivized to participate in a culture if participating in the culture is how we put food on our table.
It takes the cooperation of all cultural participants to extend a culture. The migrants in the Americas did not cultivate the land on their own. Likewise, it takes more than a few Europeans migrating to the Americas to have created the United States of America, the poster child for hyper-individualism. The values have been expounded for generations.
Our culture and economy really is, in part, the product of our biology.
Competition
Whereas cooperation helps facilitate the preservation and extension of a culture, I found evidence in Behave to suggest that competition helps improve or destroy a culture.
Improving a Culture
Improving a culture from within in a tough job. As shown earlier, there are biological incentives to keep a culture as is and spread it further. But staying stagnant is not how evolution works.
The most interesting example to me was the explanation of how Rudy Giuliani, an Italian-American and former mayor of my hometown of New York City, used his position as federal prosecutor in the 1980s to crack down on the Italian mob. He even won an award from the Italian government for attacking the United States-based mafia.
The competition to improve the Italian-American culture was fierce. On one side, the mafia crime syndicate was incredibly profitable for participants in the gang. From an honor perspective, the mafia had every right to put out 2 hits on Giuliani during that era. On the other hand, Giuliani wanted his culture to improve. In this scenario improve meant “not be looked down upon”.
In the NY Times, referring to incarcerating mob bosses for over 100 years each, he said:
And if that’s not enough to remove the Mafia prejudice, then there probably could not be anything you could do to remove it.
In the end, Giuliani seems to have won the competition. Speaking for myself as a native New Yorker, the mob was always something I associated with old gangster movies growing up, not the everyday Italian-Americans that I interacted with.
Depreciating a Culture
Of course, the fact that a culture can be improved also implies that it can decline, and decline to such an extent that it depreciates. Sometimes cultural death can be slow, like the decline of the native Tlingit language in Alaska, but other times cultural depreciation is swift and violent. Both deaths can be caused by competition between 2 cultures.
There wasn’t much biological evidence in Behave for the causes of a slow decline of a culture. Instead, I noticed that competition is used to weed out cultures from my own lived experience. Being born into a community (Brooklyn, New York) where it is common, and oftentimes, expected, to exist between 2 or more cultures, I constantly observe and experience biology governing over cultures clashing.
There is constant pressure to embrace one culture over another, depending on which context you’re in. Over time, I’ve seen this lead to the death of a culture; the children of the first-generation Americans are completely Americanized, without a trace of their grandparent’s homeland in how they solve problems. There’s no need to go into too much depth on this topic. Instead, I’ll leave this awesomely relatable TEDx video of code-switching.
A great explanation of how the competition between 2 divergent cultures leads to code-switching. While I don’t personally agree that avoiding the need for code switching should be the goal, it’s interesting that the proposed solution for 2 adversarial cultures to coexist is increased cooperation between the 2 cultures
That’s my personal experience with how competition can lead to a slow and steady cultural death, over generations. In Behave, Sapolsky gives examples of swift and painful cultural deaths, one such type is called an honor killing.
Honor killings are murders in which the victim was killed due to violating socially accepted norms. It is dishonorable to violate social convention.
Consider the murders of Amina Said and Sarah Said , 2 daughters of an Egyptian man, Yaser Abdel Said, who immigrated to the United States in 1983 for economic opportunity. He was recently convicted in August 2022. This honor killing occurred because he believed his daughters were becoming too Westernized. They got their own jobs. They started wearing clothing that revealed their stomach. These activities are the cultural practices of an individualized, disproportionally 7R-dopamine-variant society. This expression of individuality was a direct threat to the conformist culture of Egypt, especially when it came to how young women were expected to act in relation to their fathers.
Amina and Sarah Said. Photo taken from here.
The physical death of Amina and Sarah was painful and swift. But what their father wanted to kill was the manifestation of Western culture. In his eyes, the biology of his daughters was only supposed to be used to manifest the communally religious culture of Egypt. He took competition between cultures to a deadly level.
Cooperation and Competition in Business
Cooperation and competition between cultures can inform how we decide to distribute finite resources to infinite needs. When different human cultures coexist within an economy, the rules for how we accomplish efficient distribution behave more like a spectrum, as opposed to strict boundaries. Is it cooperative when Rudy Giuliani works from within his culture to change his culture? Can a culture cooperate to agree to an internal competition? When cooperation among individuals with the 7R dopamine gene variant is used to incentivize an individualistic culture, doesn’t such natural selection mean that a competition between gene pools has occurred?
Again, these questions do not have answers. But they are extremely useful for efficient problem-solving. And business is all about solving problems.
Many times, individualistic capitalism leads to a reasonable enough solution such that a for-profit business has a net positive effect on society. Objectively, life is getting better. But, as shown with examples like Theranos and FTX, or more controversially, Eli Lilly and Company (as of this writing, the idea that a chemical mandatory for survival should be free and available to all who need it is controversial), this is not always the case. After reading Behave, I believe the competition v.s cooperation heuristic can also be used to determine what for-profit businesses should do in order to have a net positive effect on society.
To have a net positive effect on society, it seems that the charter of a for-profit business is to determine how best to cooperate with humanity to preserve and extend cultures — a perfect balance (“perfect” is a category, by the way). Once a culture is in existence, competition can determine how to best improve the culture for the maximum benefit of humanity and to determine, if no longer serving its purpose of making life more enjoyable for the individual and those that they love, how the culture should be depreciated.
The crowdsourced mapping app, Waze, is a perfect example of this. Waze relies on volunteers to update the map for free. It is a for-profit business that is dependent on trust-first cooperation in order to compete on the free market.
A screenshot of what my hometown of Brooklyn, New York looks like on Waze, the crowdsourced map. The information about police sightings and traffic conditions are all cooperatively contributed by volunteers using the app. Waze is a for-profit business.
Conclusion
What This Means For Me
I find transportation businesses, like Waze, to be an awesomely symphonic interplay between the cooperation and competition. The boundary is so blurred! We cooperatively drive on the highway together, but compete for space on the road. Municipalities, companies and individuals cooperate intensely so that a pilot does not have to compete for space in the air. I was curious about transportation before Behave, but now I’m obsessed.
I’ve revived NYC’s transportation technology Meetup, with the hope that the creative serendipity of getting humans together will extend and improve the culture of transportation. I’m excited!
I want this community have a healthy balance of cooperation and competition. Too much competition causes the good values we mutually agree on to be threatened. Too much cooperation, and the community will never improve towards its goal of using technology to increase the mobility options for New Yorkers. I also want this to be a community where it is well understood that we are the product of our biology. The biggest issues in transportation — mobility options for people with disabilities, runtime schedules in poor neighborhoods and the cars-first urban design — to name a few, are all the results of an environment that was engineered to deprioritize someone’s biology.
Trying to find the appropriate balance within the community will be tricky. But Sapolsky made it clear in Behave that evolution is an experimenter, not a dictator. Eventually, the right balance will reveal itself after iterative experimentation.
What This Means for You
For you, the reader, I hope you take away from this that both cooperation and competition are needed for the efficient distribution of resources, also known as, the economy.
I chose to analyze this in terms of culture. This is because culture is (currently) the most tangible way of using biology to explain who we are at our best and worst. This should go unsaid, but I’ll say it: I’m only talking about the averages. Every individual has the capacity to be exceptional and smash through any perceived boundaries I’ve outlined in this post.
In general, though, cooperation and competition can be used as levers for how we interact with our respective cultures. I hope that it’s been self-evident that one can think of a business, community, country or species as a culture.
To recap:
Cooperation
Preserves culture
Extends culture
Competition
Improves culture
Destroys culture
The pursuit of a culture that is perfectly balanced between these 4 cultures is a tough one, but it is worth it; this pursuit is how our species preserves a culture worth extending, so that the culture may improve over time, and ultimately phase itself out if necessary.
