FAILING GRACEFULLY

01. SEARCH 02. SUBSCRIBE 03. ARCHIVE 04. RANDOM Scrambling to Head Off Power Outages Caused by Heat Waves, Rapid Growth, and Disaster & more in The Climate Post: http://t.co/IZc8jtc follow me !

NEWER

OLDER

People come togetherto attack others

A new study of how people organize raiding parties shows that informal punishment is able to keep people in line, making them stick with the group instead of free-riding. Heres the press release from the journal, the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, titled Large-scale cooperation occurs in small-scale societies: Humans cooperate at remarkably large scales in decentralized societies, partly through the informal punishment of free-riders, research suggests. To investigate how politically unstructured societies sustain cooperation, Sarah Mathew and Robert Boyd examined cooperation in warfare in a nomadic East African society known as the Turkana. In interviews with 118 warrior-aged men that included accounts of 88 raids, the researchers found that raiding parties could number several hundred warriors, most of whom were not related or close friends. Cowardice and desertion occur frequently, the researchers report, and are punished by community-imposed sanctions, including corporal punishment and fines. Norms of warfare benefit the Turkana as a whole, rather than smaller interest groups. Many scholars believe that without formal institutions, humans cooperate at a modest scale, best explained by kinship or reciprocity. Conversely, this study shows that humans cooperate at very large scales without formal coercive institutions, suggesting that such cooperation, enforced by third-party sanctions, may have evolved early in human prehistory and enabled our ecological success, according to the authors. Not too surprisingly, Darwin anticipated this, although he didnt have the hard data to back up his ideas. In The Descent of Man, he wrote: Obedience is of the highest value, for any form of government is better than none. Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be effected. A tribe rich in the above qualities

would spread and be victorious over other tribes: but in the course of time it would, judging from all past history, be in its turn overcome by some other tribe still more highly endowed. Thus the social and moral qualities would tend slowly to advance and be diffused throughout the world. Often cooperation sounds like its a great thing. Butlike most anythingthis study shows it can be used for good or bad.
Posted on June 13, 2011

Field Notes Theme. Designed by Manasto Jones. Powered by Tumblr.