The Penguin and the Leviathan

Clearly defined values are also crucial to cooperation;

Fairness is a precondition to productive collaboration.

people more readily followed game norms when they saw these norms as self-imposed, or freely chose

The results were unequivocal—when participants were given the opportunity to set their own rules and choose the punishments, their levels of cooperation were highest; people cooperated as much as 90 percent of the time. By comparison, when rules and punishments were imposed by the experimenters, levels of cooperation dropped substantially, to 67 perc

powerful study (aptly subtitled “Self-Governance Is Possible”), Elinor Ostrom, James Walker, and Roy Gardner compared the outcomes of public goods games run under three different setups: one that let the players decide when and how to punish defectors, one that let them punish one another according to rules dictated by the experimenter, and another that let subjects communicate with one another but not punish noncooperators at a

With regard to outcomes, we care about how much each of us gets out of an interaction relative to others, given the generally understood norms. For intentions, we particularly care when the outcomes are not “fair” given generally understood conventions for the situation, whether the unfair outcome was intentionally brought about or not. And as for processes, we care whether the way in which the outcome was achieved was fair or not, whatever the outcome and the intentions of the people involved.

fairness of outcomes, fairness of intentions, and fairness of processes.

successful cooperative system I discuss in this book—empathy and solidarity, moral norms, fairness, trust, and leadership

define it as a combination of cognitive and affective responses that work in tandem to identify and then replicate the emotional state of the other perso

The criteria most widely used to map personality are what psychologists refer to as “the Big Five”: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism