General Aspects of Cooperation that Potentiate but do not Determine Concrete Cooperation

Abstract

This chapter enumerates the general aspects of cooperation that are rooted in human nature. These include (1) the host of related competencies that must be concretely developed in order to actualize cooperation; (2) how cooperation develops, or the processes that are necessary to develop cooperation, (3) what kind of social-psychological relationship cooperation is, (4) how it relates to individuality, fulfillment, freedom, civilization, and humanness; (5) the social and psychological benefits that result from cooperation—i.e., how cooperation stimulates advanced human psychology such as symbolic communication and thinking; (6) how human nature generates cooperation—i.e., how a distinctive kind of biology is necessary to generate cooperation; (7) how this distinctive biology does not exist in animals, which is why cooperation is unique to humans, at least advanced forms of it are; (8) a comparison of human and animal cooperation; (9) how cooperation is a social relation that depends upon social processes; (10) how the actual practice of cooperation is potentiated by human nature, but is not determined or impelled by human nature. The actual practice depends upon developing concrete forms of cooperation and cultural conditions that facilitate it. Consequently, psychological theories that explain actual cooperation in terms of biological processes or abstract competencies place too much weight on them and do not incorporate concrete, cultural-historical factors that are necessary for cooperative praxis.

End Notes

1. The major phylogenetic changes in the human organism have not been in physical organs that enhance individual prowess (e.g. strength, speed, camouflage, sensory acuity—vision, and hearing). Instead, new human organs facilitate cultural activities such as speech (vocal chords, jaw, tongue, and teeth), thinking (the neocortex), the use of tools (opposable thumb), and small teeth that are suitable for eating food from (the cultural activity) cooking. Importantly, the organs produced by human evolution are general purpose organs which are capable of flexible use that can be decided by the organism as conditions change and as group needs change. Human psycho-biological organs are not designated for specific tasks. Whereas a bird’s beak is specifically designated to break and hold particular foods (e.g., certain sized seeds), the human hand is designed for holding any kind of tool to accomplish any purpose (from eating to building a house). Where animal vocal chords, tongue, and mouth are specifically designed to produce certain kinds of characteristic sounds, human vocal chords, tongue, and mouth are flexible enough to speak any kind of language. The human neocortex is similarly a general purpose organ that is dominated by association centers which synthesize information. (Ratner 2006, 2012a).

2. All illusions work because they violate people’s realistic assumptions that have been empirically confirmed in past experience.

3. Children also become invested in promulgating social norms to others. Three-year-olds were shown how to play a one-player game.

When a puppet later entered and announced that it too, would play the game, but then did so in a different way, most of the children objected, sometimes vociferously. The children’s language when they objected demonstrated clearly that they were not just expressing their personal displeasure at a deviation. They made generic normative declarations like, “It doesn’t work like that,” “One can’t do that,” and so forth. They do not merely disapprove of the puppet playing the game differently; he is playing it improperly. This behavior is of critical importance, as it is one thing to follow a norm and it is quite another to legislate the norm when not involved oneself.

The children had only to see the adult demonstrate the game—in a straightforward way with no normative judgments of language—before they jumped to normative conclusions about how the game should be played (Tomasello 2010, pp. 37–38).

This is a telling description that demonstrates that young children actively become social agents who have a sense of shared intentionality, promulgate social norms as important to obey, and castigate violations of it. They do not invent idiosyncratic, personal meanings about social behavior, as many “micro cultural” psychologists claim (Ratner 2012a). Because social cooperation is humans’ adaptive mechanism that produces their survival and fulfillment, individuals have a vested interested in maintaining the cooperative social process. Humans are distinctively attentive to social processes because we depend on them for our survival and fulfillment. Humans must be concerned with maintaining social norms to achieve stable, regular, predictable, dependable social interactions which are the foundation of our survival and fulfillment. Animals which function primarily on an individual level have no need, or ability, to attend to, and preserve, social norms, and processes.

4. All evolutionary psychology falls into these reductionistic errors. All variants assume that cooperation arises from some individual capacity that is genetically prepared. Genes only operate on individuals to generate individual behavior, so this is the level at which evolutionary psychology operates. Evolutionary psychologists do not recognize—cannot recognize—that cooperation arises from the advantage of constructing particular socially organized macro level institutional norms. What is key to cooperation is the forming of macro cultural factors that entail collective forms of ownership and distribution of resources, certain forms of decision making, certain legal rights and obligations, and sanctions. None of these can have any genetic-evolutionary basis. They all must be socially constructed. Thus, the search for cooperation in individual biological processes is wrong-headed. It cannot explain the basic social problem of why humans, who have all the biologically evolved individual capacities for culture and cooperation, have failed to achieve real cooperation on the societal level. Clearly, individual cognitive capacities do not automatically generate cooperative social institutions.

Individual cognitive capacities are necessary but not sufficient for cooperation. Individuals make culture and cooperation, however, not as individuals on an individual or inter-individual level. Similarly, biology processes cultural behavior but does not program it. The fact that individuals and biology are involved in culture, cooperation, and psychology does not mean that the latter are essentially biological or individual phenomena that are explainable by biological or individual mechanisms. Individuals and biology are taken up in emergent phenomena. Evolutionary psychology and biology seek to essentially bring emergent cultural phenomena back down to individual and biological mechanisms, or explanatory constructs.