Next you want to think about the challenge of cooperation. How do we get people to cooperate with us even when they might be better off themselves, if they didn't have to work so hard, or didn't have to help us out? I want to start with a story. And this is a story about a homicide detective, Marshall Frank. He's a very experienced detective, and he had this one case, where he knew Paul Rowles was guilty. He knew it, but he couldn't prove it and what he really wanted was a confession. So he sat down with Paul Rowles and, in this case, Rowles' neighbor had been strangled and Detective Frank was going for this confession. Now, in this interrogation what's interesting is that Rowels knows that this is the game, that is he knows the detective wants a confession. And in 30 minutes Detective Frank ended up getting that confession. So he ended up getting somebody to be cooperative with what he wanted, he wanted this confession and he did it relatively fast. And one question I want to ask is, how? And I want to suggest that this really speaks to the idea of cooperation. How do they get people to step over and help us out do things that we want even when it's not in their own best interest? So it's related to other questions that are very different. So would you let a complete stranger sleep in your house? Well generally not, but that's exactly what Airbnb is predicated upon. That is, it's a system that allows people to do exactly that. So we think about how to cooperate in a social dilemma. A social dilemma is a multi party prisoner's dilemma. So the prisoner dilemma case is just two people. But we often have a lot of cases with multiple people. So we can think about things like, how do we work together to reduce car emissions? We want everyone to smog test their car. But individually, we'd rather not smog test our own car. Or we think about, over fishing, we'd rather everybody else cut back with fishing. But individually we would rather fish as much as we could. So individually we have incentives to defect or do what's in our own best interests, but collectively we would like everybody to come together and do what's best for the collective. So those are social dilemmas. How do we solve those? And we can think about the prisoner's dilemma as the first case. That is, this is the fruit fly of the social dilemma problem. Now in the classic prisoner's dilemma, we have two people. So you can think about Detective Frank's case, you'd like to get a confession, and if they confess, it's going to be easier for the whole legal process to go forward. But individually, for that potential criminal, it's not great for them individually to confess. Now imagine you've caught two people. They could tattle on each other, and confess, or they could not confess. Here I'm thinking about cooperation with each other. So, imagine these two criminals like to cooperate. They like to cooperate with each other, and not confess. So, if they don't confess, then they both end up with a light sentence. There isn't a lot of evidence that can't be prosecuted for that much so they both get a very light sentence, say, six months. Now, if they both do confess, they both get five years. So clearly the're better off if they both cooperate with each other and don't confess. Now, here's what's interesting. If one of them defects or one of them cooperates with the defense, and spills the beans about the whole story, and the other one doesn't. Well, imagine a detective here who says look, I'm going to give you a special deal. If you spill the beans, another one doesn't, you're going to go free but the other person is going to get 10 years. So, individually here, the person who's facing this problem really has a dilemma. They could try to do what's best for that group, the collective and cooperate. Or they could defect and do what's best for themselves in which case they end up with a better outcome. Now in this case, they always end up with the better outcome no matter what their counter part does. So if their counter part is going to talk, they'd rather talk, if their counter part's not going to talk, they're still better off talking. So individually they still have this drive to do what's in their best interest, their own selfish interest. But we want to push people to cooperate, even though it's costly for them. So we want to think about how do we do that? How do we get a coworker to stay late, take up an extra assignment? How do we get our kids to do more chores around the house? How do we get our spouse to help us out more? Even when they'd rather hang out on the couch. Watch TV or do something else. So we have this constant problem both at work and at home, to try to get people to cooperate even when they're pulled in the opposite direction with their own self interest. And we can think about a lot of social dilemmas. So I talked about greenhouse gases before and over fishing, but we're going to try and conserve water. We want everybody to take shorter showers, but ourselves we like to take that longer shower. Or contributing to things like public radio, but working on a project and in many negotiation settings, we could share more information which helps to create value. But it might be at odds with our own individual interests in trying to claim value. So we have this tension. Now as a manager, managers are constantly trying to solve this social dilemma. They're trying to get people to cooperate when people might naturally be pulled in opposite directions. Here's some ides. Here's things that facilitate cooperation. First, we want to build relationships. So the more people identify with us, the better. Sociologists call this the Shadow of the Past. So if we have team bonding experiences, we have a shared history. That will bind us together and will create a sense of we're all in this together. We have a shared goal here, and that shared goal gets people to cooperate more effectively. It relates to this idea of a shared identity. So do I see myself as part of this group? So the names that we call each other, so are we partners? Are we employees? Do I think of myself? Do I wear logoed clothing that has my company name on it? Do I see myself as part of this organization? And the stronger that sense of identify, the stronger cooperation is. And then third, sociologists have this term, Shadow of the Future, for how likely we are to interact in the future. So if I know this is a long term relationship, then helping you out now is a much easier thing to do because I know there's going to be a time in the future that you might help me out as well. So the longer the future horizon is, the more likely we are to get cooperation. So the past identity is a sign of the future. A couple of other things that are important for cooperation, what is clear communication? So can I communicate what I need, and why I need it clearly? And can we figure out a way to collaborate? So the better the communication, the more effective the cooperation. And this is going to mean that face-to-face communication is particularly important. Face-to-face communication's important for a lot of different reasons that we'll talk about. But one is it allows the most complete kind of communication we can get. And the next we're thinking about expectations. So what expectations do we have in this? Am I communicating that I really care about my own self-interest, or am I communicating we're all in this together? So, people have actually played the prisoner's dilemma game with experiments for money or other prizes. And what they found is that when you describe the game as a community game people are far more cooperative than if people would describe it as the Wall Street Game. And the Wall Street Game people put on this lens or mentality that they're in it for themselves, and end up being much more competitive. So the way we describe things, the expectations that we set, profoundly influence how cooperative people are. They're trying to figure out what game are we playing. And the way we communicate is going to profoundly influence that. Next to think about accountabilities. So can we observe behavior? So I talked about saving water. Now, people are more likely to cut back on watering their lawn because their neighbors can see that, taking a shorter shower is harder to observe. When we can't observe people cooperating or defecting, people are more likely to defect. And anonymity hurts cooperation. And things like rating systems which makes AirBnb effective help cooperation. And the more broadly, trust. If we can build a trusting relationship then we get cooperation. And we'll say a bit more about trust. So here are the key ideas. Shadow of the past, what we've done in the past. A shared identity. I identify myself with this group. A shadow of the future, this future interaction we're going to have. Effective and clear communication. We set expectations for cooperation. We hold people accountable. That means we can observe what they do and the repercussions for what they do. You can think about taxes, for example. We sometimes audit people's taxes. There are penalties for not paying taxes. It's a way to get people to cooperate for the collective good. Even though that individually they'd rather not, and then trust. The more trusting our relationships, the more effective cooperation is.
