Collaboration vs Competition

When one looks to nature, we see that competition is everywhere. Organisms must constantly compete with each other for the resources and mates necessary to ensure that their genes are passed on. This is the basis for evolution by natural selection, as first postulated by Charles Darwin (1).

However, there are also certain species that exhibit a different kind of behaviour: cooperation. While this is most evident in humans, it is also present in some other social species, such as our cousins the chimps (2). But if evolution is driven by competition, where did this cooperative behaviour come from? After all, behaviours like cooperation and altruism are often detrimental (at least initially) to the organism, and can result in increased 'fitness' of other potential competitors.

There are a few theories as to how these collaborative behaviours came about. The theory of reciprocal altruism states that an organism will aid another member of its group with the expectation that the favour will be returned (3). The theory of kin selection states that we are driven by evolution to aid those who are most genetically similar to us (direct and extended family members) in order to ensure that our genes are passed on, whether or not we specifically survive to do the passing (4). Handicap theory suggests that, like the massive nutrient consuming tails of male peacocks, altruism and cooperation are behaviours developed in order to make us appear more attractive to the opposite sex (essentially, an organism will 'handicap' itself in some way in order to increase sexual success) (5).

Although there is some evidence for each of these theories, none of them alone appears to completely explain the extreme collaborative behaviours found in human society. There is some evidence which suggests that large scale cooperation arose not only out of an evolutionary need, but also from a cultural need. This has been attributed to inter-group violence, where different groups of humans form cooperative tribes in order to successfully compete with other tribes. Interestingly, there is evidence which suggests that periods of inter-tribal violence were highest during times when resources were scarce. In such situations, the ability to cooperate within the group would greatly improve the odds of survival not just for the individual organism, but for the entire group. Conversely, those groups who lacked the ability to cooperate amongst themselves would have been selected against (6).

The take-home message of these studies is essentially this: cooperation is favourable for survival and it likely arose out of both evolution and cultural advancements, much like competition.

But which type of behaviour is more 'natural' for humans? Are we 'inherently' competitive, or is it more natural for us to be cooperative? As it turns out, neither line of thought is entirely correct.

Experiments designed to test the competitive and collaborative behaviours of humans sometimes take the form of artificial 'games' which were often designed to draw conclusions about economic behaviour by involving a system of rewards. This type of research is used in both economics and psychology. While game theory ultimately rests on artificial situations, enough repetition and variation can allow some general inferences to be made regarding the way humans behave in certain situations. For example, one such study testing bargaining behaviour in different situations showed that the personality most favoured (those who were entirely self-serving vs. those who were concerned with fairness) was based on the economic situation presented (7):

“It turns out that the economic environment determines whether the fair types or the selfish types dominate equilibrium behavior.” - Fehr and Schmidt, 1999

It's also interesting to note the link between competition, cooperation, and self esteem. A study observing levels of self esteem in children made an interesting finding: in societies where competition is encouraged, children associated competition with greater self esteem. However, in societies where cooperation was encouraged, children tended to associate cooperation with greater self-esteem. In either case, it was not some inherent quality of the child, but rather the culture itself that most influenced self-esteem (8).