Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups

by Paul W.B. Atkins

We create and derive networks of meaning to understand and predict the behaviors of others.

stepping into the perspective of another, seeing things from their point of view and drawing a circle that takes them in, is one of the hardest things in the world to do.

Interpersonal skills such as listening well and speaking assertively, not aggressively

Personal skills such as emotion regulation and perspective taking

Group-level agreements and processes for managing conflict efficiently and effectively

Groups that experience no conflict, not even task conflict, are usually composed of highly avoidant members who are deferential to the leader.

Whereas task conflict tends to produce more effective group decisions, relationship conflict is usually associated with poorer group decisions.

This is particularly likely to happen when trust is low and, consequently, people are more likely to misconstrue disagreement as criticism.

And this balance ebbs and flows, it's not static even between people who live each other (business and life partners).

Unhealthy conflict

often involves people competing for scarce resources or power,

It is hard to maintain shared identity and purpose (core design principle 1), equity (core design principle 2), inclusive decision making (core design principle 3), transparency (core design principle 4), or effective responding (core design principle 5) when people don’t trust one another enough to grapple with their differences.

One fascinating study found that self-managed teams tended to literally restructure themselves in response to unmanaged conflict. Over time, people shared less information with one another, were less trusting of giving others autonomy to make decisions, and avoided others with whom they were supposed to be cooperating, all of which eventually undermined many of the benefits of giving a group authority to manage itself.

establishing a mandate for himself

An integrative approach is about neither winning over nor giving in, neither competing nor entirely accommodating.

Whereas a position states a specific action or event that needs to occur (top right), an interest is a broader value (bottom right) or concern (bottom left). Positions correspond to just one path of action, whereas interests leave open the possibility of many different paths to satisfy those interests.

What would you like to accomplish by getting X?

WHY is it important to accomplish X?

shift the focus from the unchangeable past or present to what we want for the future,

a Prosocial guide to difficult conversations (“How Can We Make Conversations More Prosocial?”), available at our website (http://www.prosocial.world),

a team that does not engage with conflict is likely to be wasting effort on suppressing and avoiding what needs to be confronted.

learning to take the perspective of others, empathize with them, and tolerate the pain of conflict helps transform the meaning of conflict from something to be avoided into something to be used for learning and growth.

This could be an invaluable skill in making a better world.

The mentality of scarcity and competition generated by win-lose group cultures is both born out of, and contributes to, fear and anxiety.

The more afraid I am of loss, the more I attend to the possibilities of loss. And the more I do that, the more afraid I become. It’s a vicious cycle that drives group members apart.

“Madam, do I not destroy our enemies by making them our friends?”

Unfortunately their friendship was conditional on having free rain to oppress others. Maybe the Matrix would have helped shift the Confederacy to a common cause with the North that did not include oppressing others. The a si, the North was already on the path of exploiting the propertyless, regardless of color.

“getting up on the balcony”

But only after you fully empathisize with the dancers, only after being a dancer yourself. So the person who gets up to the balcony must be a member of the team, not the facilitator.

Perspective taking doesn’t just involve the cognitive demands of observing oneself operating alongside others who are operating from their own perspective; there are also emotional demands.

Unfortunately, the very people who most need to take the perspective of others—leaders—are less likely to do so when there are strong expectations that the job of the leader is to control.

increased power leads to increased distancing from others, as well as a reduction in the capacity to take the other’s perspective.

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Guinote, A. (2017). How power affects people: Activating, wanting, and goal seeking.

complete an individual matrix from the perspective of the other.

Groups can also use a chair to signify the collective group purpose.

A rubber duck.

having agreed-upon principles and processes that everyone can trust can greatly help the process of conflict resolution.

Conflict is the most obvious expression of tensions between interests within and between groups.

conflict is often associated with fear and avoidance,

to foster rather than inhibit such community-building efforts.

Right to repair.

it was essential that external authorities not challenge the right of a group to form its own rules and impose its own sanctions, as long as they don’t violate basic human rights.

the capacity and power to author one’s own experience.

a central authority should have a subsidiary function,

many institutions that claim local autonomy for themselves deny it to the groups that they preside over. A corporation might fight against government regulations but itself have a top-down command-and-control organization.

The core design principles are so sensitive to context that nearly every group will need to continuously monitor how its implementation is working, and change it as problems are encountered.

without having learned them from Elinor Ostrom,

Ostrom didn't make them up. She learned them from organizations, CPRs, that practiced them.

It is enough that nobody has a principled objection,

Sociocracy figured this out.

About 450 supervisors, managers, and engineers were forced to run an operation that normally employed a workforce of three thousand—and

That is a 6x inefficiency factor (a tax) created by the hierarchy.

Core design principle 7 is key to the success of rapid results.

By the time a Navy SEAL team is trained, its members combined truly compose a superorganism capable of acting in a coordinated fashion in a split second.

The genius of Ostrom, and perhaps the biggest contribution of the Prosocial process, is that its principles are scalable to any level.

groups that function well can replace groups that function poorly just by surviving longer, giving rise to similar groups to a greater degree, either by direct replication or by imitation.

adaptation at any given level requires a process of selection at that level and tends to be undermined by selection at lower levels.

For example, cooperation among relatives can become nepotism.

Cooperation among friends can become cronyism.

Policies based on “My nation first” can be toxic...