Paul Hartzog posted the following quote to Smart Mobs (originally posted at PSOM blog by Dan Jones):
New research published in Nature
shows how biases towards members of our social group, and against those
outside it, shape how generous we are to people and how we punish
others for transgressing social norms.
Humans are socially sticky: we bond into cohesive groups that
commonly share a common identity and, often, similar values. This
applies to social circles and local communities as much as to
nationality and global religious and political affiliation. Such unity
can encourage people within the group to pull together, to help one
another when in need – in short, to get along.
But there’s a downside to human ‘groupishness’: a mental division
between members of the ingroup, to whom social and even moral
obligations apply, and various outgroups, to whom they do not. People
who live in different groups — geographical, social or ethnic — often
treat outgroup members as ‘others’ (something viewers of Lost will be
familiar with), frequently arousing enmity and stoking conflict. Note
how groups really come into their own and pull together when pitted
against other groups in the human speciality of war.
Students of the work of Clare W. Graves know that this can be further examined by looking at "why" any given group draws these divisions between themselves and the "others".
Dan Jones goes on to write:
One of the most crucial findings of this research is the extent to
which people will incur a cost to punish non-cooperators, and how
powerful a force this is in eliciting cooperation from those tempted to
defect. Studies with economic games across the world have revealed that
the degree to which people will take a monetary hit to punish the
unequal division of a sum of money (provided by the experimenter)
increases as the split becomes more unequal.
But this isn’t the
whole story. Behind the general trend lurks much variation. Perhaps the
most important way in which punishing behaviour varies is in the
threshold of selfishness that elicits punishment from others. Players
living in certain societies won’t punish until the outcomes of dividing
money in economic games is grossly unequal, whereas other are much
quicker to lay down the law. Some societies even have norms that lead
to the punishment of unequal but hyper-fair splits of the money stash
(so that the person controlling how much is given to another a player
gives away more than 50%), which is something of a puzzle.
I would say that this puzzle might be solved by looking at Graves's "Levels of Existence Theory". Graves created a framework for understanding why some societies might be motivated to punish non-cooperation in different ways. Dan continues:
The new study
addresses a different question, one about altruism, altruistic
punishment and groupishness. Do we respond to transgressions of social
norms by our ingroup differently than violation of those same norms by
members of an outgroup? Are we more forgiving of the former and harsher
on the latter by virtue of their group allegiance? The answer looks
like a qualified ‘yes’.
Students of Graves's theories and Spiraldynamics will probably recognize the thinking observed by the study. The polarization can be found in different forms throughout the first six levels of thinking. But, in general, we can see that the research discussed above tends to display that fourth level thinking is still widespread in group interaction. Is it possible that when people with many different levels of thinking form or participate in a group, that they might collectively under some conditions tend to default to the level that allows everyone to work together?
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