Cooperation
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Co-operation refers to the practice of people or greater entities working in common with commonly agreed-upon goals and possibly methods, instead of working separately in competition.
Cooperation is the antithesis of competition.
Co-operation in many areas such as, farming and housing may be in the form of a co-operative or, alternately, in the form of a conventional business.
Many people support cooperation as the ideal form of management of human affairs. In terms of individuals obtaining goods and services, rather than resorting to theft or confiscation, they may cooperate by trading with each other or by altruistic sharing.
A few mechanisms have been suggested for the appearance of cooperation between humans or in natural systems.
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[edit] The Prisoner's Dilemma
Even if all members of a group would benefit if all cooperate, individual self-interest may not favor cooperation. The prisoner's dilemma codifies this problem and has been the subject of much research, both theoretical and experimental. Results from experimental economics show that humans often act more cooperatively than strict self-interest would seem to dictate.
One reason for this may be that if the prisoner's dilemma situation is repeated (see iterated prisoner's dilemma), it allows non-cooperation to be punished more, and cooperation to be rewarded more, than the single-shot version of the problem would suggest. It has been suggested that this is one reason for the evolution of complex emotional and social behavior in higher animals.
There are four main conditions that tend to be necessary for co-operative behavior to develop between two individuals:
- An overlap in desires
- A chance of future encounters with the same individual
- Memory of past encounters with that individual
- A value associated with future outcomes
[edit] see also
[edit] References
- The Evolution of Cooperation, Robert Axelrod, Basic Books, ISBN 0465021212
- The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins (1990), second edition -- includes two chapters about the evolution of cooperation, ISBN 0192860925
- The Seven Challenges: A Workbook and Reader About Communicating More Cooperatively, Dennis Rivers, fourth edition, 2005 -- treats cooperation as a set of skills that can be improved.
[edit] External links
- MetaCollab.net, a free collaborative encyclopedia on collaboration - please come and share the wikilove!
- PDF The Cooperation Project: Objectives, Accomplishments, and Proposals [rheingold.com Howard Rheingold]'s project with Stanford's Institute for the Future.
The page was seeded with material from Wikipedia This term is part of the Infoshop Glossary
