Transcriber: Claude Almansi Reviewer: Chryssa R. Takahashi
I'm very glad to be here.
So, I want to talk today about trust, cooperation, and productivity.
I want to say that two minds are better than one,
but only under certain conditions.
Trust in cooperation are aspects of human behavior,
necessary for almost any type of collective activity.
We trust and cooperate when we make love,
when we are with our friends,
but we also do it when it comes to governments,
production line and policy-making.
The problem with trust is that trust is dangerous.
Trust me.
(Laughter)
But why? Why do I say that?
Why do I think that trust is dangerous?
Trust is a necessary pre-condition for cooperation.
We can see this answering the question, "Can I trust you to do this thing?"
We can see trust
as something that it allows me
to assess the degree of risk that I may face
when I get into some kind of interaction with somebody else,
that may be a good possibility for cooperation.
This, for example, can explain why in some cultures,
we - and I say 'we' because in Greece, we do that -
we use family relations to solve the problem of trust.
Trust is a very risky endeavor
and that's why individuals may take fewer and fewer risks.
Of course, the problem is that we are not as rational as we think that we are
and that's why, most of the time, we trust the wrong people.
Let's see trust as the path to good cooperation.
Extensive research has shown that we cooperate a lot
and we do that because we are social creatures,
and we are dependent on other people.
But we, humans, do not just cooperate.
We coordinate our cooperative actions, and we have extremely good ideas,
or at least, we think that we do have good ideas
about how cooperation should be done.
For me, I started thinking about all this trust and cooperation
when I started my career as an academic,
and I found out that it's so much better when I cooperate with others.
Of course, somebody may ask, "Isn't that an obvious fact?"
Well, I don't think so.
I wonder, does always cooperation, even bad cooperation,
lead to better results?
So, research has shown
that over-cooperation or bad cooperation,
it's much worse than no cooperation at all.
And why is that?
Because we think that cooperation is a good thing, and we keep on doing it,
and we don't stop for a while to ask some critical questions,
to get out of bad relationships, for example,
or to stop really bad projects.
So we do more of it, we spend more time on it.
I guess you have all been in such situations like this,
where you are in an extremely boring meeting.
So imagine what happens when this happens to your erotic relationship.
If on a business level, bad cooperation has so negative results,
what happens in a society, in a whole society,
where people do not trust each other, and they do not cooperate a lot,
or they do not know how to cooperate a lot?
So, what happens to a group of people
that there is not enough trust that would lead to good cooperation?
So, we do know that lack of trust is killing the economy.
That's the first thing.
The lower a society's course in trust,
the higher the corruption levels are.
I guess you are looking for Greece: we score 94,
together with countries like Columbia and Mongolia.
That's not very good.
So the main question becomes:
"How can we make it to trust and cooperate more and better?"
As I said before, from my personal experience at the university, in my work,
the best outcomes come when my colleagues and I cooperate.
At the same time,
it can be said that universities are the temples of specialization.
Each one of us is extremely specialized in some very distinct area of knowledge
and sometimes, we get so specialized
that we don't even want to know somebody else's specialty:
we just want to take what he has to give us and that's fine for us.
To give you an idea about that, I'm a behavioral economist
and I'm obviously specialized in cooperation,
- or at least that's what I say so -
and I share an office with an anthropologist
who is specialized in Latin American cultures,
and specifically, in Guatemala,
and a psychologist who is specialized in non-linear statistics,
whatever that means.
At the same time, we cooperate, and we work together,
and we are interdependent to each other.
So, this extreme specialization is known as division of labor.
During the Industrial Revolution,
Adam Smith talked about this efficiency-oriented account
and some years later, the famous sociologist Emile Durkheim
argued that the division of labor is also good for social solidarity,
for social cohesion: it connects people,
it makes people to be more interdependent to each other.
So, I started together with my colleagues to think of how we can experiment
with this idea of division of labor,
how we can get it in the lab.
And we wanted to see what would be
the implications of division of labor for cooperation.
Our questions were:
"Does division of labor lead to greater productivity?"
And also: "Does division of labor lead to higher social solidarity?"
So we designed an experiment - that's what we are doing -
to measure the division of labor, and we used the degree of synchrony
between participants' hand movements and heart rate profiles.
So the tool on your left is an accelerometer,
and it measures how we move our hands on the tri-dimensional space,
and the Polar on your right measures our pulse, heart pulse.
And we also use participants' self-reports
to find out how much fun and cooperative they were.
So, what we did is we gave Legos to participants,
two pairs of individual Legos,
and we asked them to build cars, and they built more than 200 cars.
What we told them is that they should build cars that they are functional,
so we can play with them afterwards; beautiful cars.
We separated them in two conditions.
In one condition, which we called the hierarchical condition,
one participant was the boss, and the other was the assistant.
The boss was the one that could make all the decisions during the building task,
whereas the assistant could only follow orders.
In the other condition, which we called the egalitarian condition,
so, the equality condition,
both participants were equal in terms of decision-making
they could both say their opinion about how the car should look like
and what bricks they should use, and everything.
When the task was finished,
we also asked the participants how well they cooperated.
So we asked them: "How good do you think that your cooperation was?"
And we also asked them how much fun they had during the building of the car.
The best part of the study, when you play with Lego,
is that you, yourself, get to play with them.
At the end of each session we took the cars, we collected them,
and we started playing around, to see how functional they are.
And we also took a ramp and we ran the cars down
and measured the distance that they can travel;
so, how good the product is.
And we also found some other people that they didn't know what we were doing
and we asked them to rate the cars, esthetically; we told them:
"How beautiful do you think that these cars are, in a scale from 1 to 5."
What happens when you compare these two conditions?
First of all, we found that in the egalitarian condition,
the division of labor is much higher.
You can see on your left, up, on the left up figure
that when you let people free, let them do what they want to do,
when you don't tell them who is going to do what,
they divide the labor more and that means that they get more interdependent.
Also, we found that the more the division of labor between the participants
during their drawing construction,
the better the product performance is.
You can see that on the left, down.
Both esthetically and functionally,
the cars were better when the division of labor was really high
and that means, mainly in the egalitarian condition.
We also found that a higher division of labor is associated
with better fun in cooperation.
So, the higher there was the division of labor,
the participants really liked the interaction more,
and they say that "Yes, we were very cooperative and we had lots of fun."
The problem is that today, our economy is not an assembly-line-only economy.
Well, I don't now if that's a problem, but anyway, that's the case.
Researchers like Dan Ariely have argued
that our economy is based on meaning and knowledge;
sharing knowledge and sharing information.
Having that in mind, we were thinking
of how we can bring knowledge, meaning, and information in our experiment,
and somehow test them.
In order to do that, we ran two more closely related studies
that I will present to you now.
In one of the studies, we gave to participants
wooden building blocks, like these,
and again we separated them in two conditions.
In one condition, which we called the transparent condition,
we showed them the final state
of what they were supposed to build.
They were all following instructions and we just showed them this castle.
In the other condition, which we called the opaque condition,
they were following exactly the same instructions
but we just didn't show them the end state of what they are doing altogether.
Everything else was equal in the experiment.
After the building task...
in order to measure cooperation, the participants played an economic game,
which we called the Public Goods Game.
In this economic game, we had some money,
let's say that we have 10 Euros and we are [some of those] people
and we get to decide
how much of this money to invest and how much to keep for ourselves.
We invest the money in a common project, in a common pool
and the money that we invest get multiplied
and then divided equally again to all players.
So if the players invest all their money,
they get in the end more money as a group.
But of course, there is the problem of bad people,
which, in scientific terms, we call them free-riders,
and they may keep all the money for themselves,
and also take advantage
of the common project money, of the pool money.
So all players have a dilemma, actually:
"if I invest my money and the other player defects, and he doesn't invest,
I may end up having much less money than I had in the beginning of the game.
But if both or all players invest,
we will earn more from the cooperation, as a group."
So, in the experiment, we found that participants that know,
that can see the end state of what they are doing together,
are highly more cooperative.
So, participants that trust the other,
an 'other' who works towards the same goal as they do,
are highly more cooperative.
In the other experiment, we took this into pieces
and we asked participants to assemble it back.
Do you know what this is?
The ones that know?
No, only a few of you.
Yeah, I was expecting that.
So, this is an apple-peeler, it peels apples.
Yeah, it looks weird, it looks like a torture machine:
most participants told us that it is a torture machine.
So, the idea here is extremely simple.
We give the participants...
- we again separate the participants in two groups -
In the first group
we didn't tell them what this is.
We just told them: "Build it, please, assemble it."
In the other condition, we told them,
"You know, this is an apple-peeler, and build it."
So, they knew the function of what they're going to build together.
And again, in the end, we asked them to play
the same economic game as in the previous study,
the Public Goods Game,
but this time we changed it a little bit:
we asked some participants to play both against their group mate
and another unknown person,
somebody out of the group who they didn't know, they hadn't met.
What we found is that when you know what you're doing,
when you know the function of the good you're producing,
you're becoming highly more cooperative,
both with your group mate but also with an unknown person.
You're just becoming better,
you share more.
So, to summarize: dividing the labor
makes us more satisfied with our cooperation and more productive
but as I said before, we need something more.
So, seeing the end game of what we are conjointly doing
makes us more reliable to others, and more cooperative.
But also by knowing how the fruit of our collaboration looks like,
we are more willing to overcome selfishness
and share with the others.
To understand that better, let me go back a little bit to the Lego experiment
and let's think about it.
We called the one condition egalitarian
not only because people were equal in terms of decisions
but also because they were making decisions equally,
and they knew how their final products would look like
because they were equal, they discussed about it.
So they said, "OK, let's build the car like this."
So in the egalitarian condition, we have two people
that share the same meaning, the same knowledge.
Therefore, in the egalitarian condition,
we have a shared goal, common knowledge, and divided labor.
So, two minds are better than one.
But when?
How in a world full of bad people and egoists,
can we enhance cooperation and productivity?
We saw that by dividing our labor,
we become more interdependent to each other,
and by knowing the function of what we are doing
and how this product looks like, we can have more fun,
we can become more cooperative, and build trust.
Trust is indeed dangerous,
but there is a reward: good cooperation.
Maybe we should start talking more as individuals,
but also as a society,
about the things we value,
and the means, and the ends,
the process, and the goal.
We all know that they are there, but I believe that we should clarify them
and by doing this, to build value, trust, and cooperation.
So, let's find what connects us.
Thank you.
(Applause)