Book Review: Atkins, Wilson, Hayes (2022) Prosocial
Book Review & Study Guide Template: Summary (appearing first in the review, but written after chapter learnings), Chapter Learnings, Select Quotes, Additional Materials
Summary: Why I Read This Book
Cultural evolution – humanity collectively learning new capabilities, including learning to invest more in win-win games (markets) and less in lose-lose games (wars). Increasing capabilities to find better ways to benefit all stakeholders, including future generations, while avoiding harms, is a worthy pursuit. What has humanity learned about finding ways to avoid short-term benefits to individuals that create long-term harms to groups? How does multilevel evolution (from biology to cultural prosocial behaviors) sort through a wide-range of possibilities without getting stuck in traps? Better decision-making about resources (collaboration versus coercion) is key to win-win outcomes, but how should decision-making about resources be implemented – markets or hierarchies or something else? The commons which originate in small scale family and village life with shared resources, studied by Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom, is the progenitor to both large scale markets and hierarchies. This book provides a concise and clear introduction to the multilevel prosocial evolution challenge. Next, the authors dive deep into the eight core design principles (8 CDP) that can in practice lead to high performance groups: purpose, distribution, fairness, monitoring, responding, conflicts, authority, relations. The “secret to success” (i.e., a culture that wisely practices the 8 CDP) seems to be groups in which individuals strongly develop the capability of cognitive flexibility to avoid being mentally harmed in the short-term (i.e., replacing knee-jerk anger and fear with curiosity and understanding).
Ray Fisk, the founder of ServCollab, recommended the book to me, which is the primary reason I read it. The book certainly delivered a wealth of insights about service interaction and change processes between entities applying resources to benefit others at all scales in business and society. I also recommend this book to anyone interested in a deeper understanding of human cultural evolution and the possibility of designing a human world without coercion based on the eight core design principles of successful commons.
Chapter Learnings
The “Contents, Foreword, Introduction” are concise and provide a well-designed useful quick overview of the journey ahead, and strategies for getting the most out of the book.
Part 1: Concepts and Principles
Chapter 1. Evolution at Multiple Levels and in Multiple Streams – Multilevel Selection (MLS) Theory (“big slice versus big pie”)
Darwin’s theory of evolution, based on populations with haracteristics of (1) variation, (2) fitness (selection), and (3) heritability (retention), is extended from biology to multiple levels including the social (individual, family, community groups, organizations, states, nations, world). What’s good at one level (selection) is often undermined by what’s good at lower levels. Can we understand and wisely manage multilevel evolution (MLS)?
Chapter 2. Elinor Ostrom and the Commons
This chapter compares the strengths and weaknesses of three forms of governance: laissez-faire (markets), hierarchies (centralized control), and commons (oldest). Ostrom studied the commons. She was the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics (December 10, 2009), for her framing of the Core Design Principles (CDP) for common pool resources and polycentric governance ideas (multiple generations of people maintaining cooperation and avoiding “the tragedy of the commons” in which short-term-desires and/or coercion replaces what started out as cooperation). David Sloan (second authors) worked with Ostrom for three years before her death in 2012, to frame her CDP ideas more broadly in terms of multilevel selection (MLS) and evolution theory. Ostrom’s CPD work highlighted: clearly defined boundaries, proportional equivalence, collective choice, monitoring, graduated sanctions, conflict resolution, (at least a) minimal recognition of rights to organize (and self-manage), and polycentric governance. The challenges of the commons are scaling and multilevel selection. All three forms of governance deal with entities making decisions about applying resources for the benefit of self and others (the give-get-grow of service in the world).
Chapter 3. Core Design Principles, Version 2.0
Begins with Steven Covey quote about three constants of life – change, choice, and principles. My version is change, choice, and character. The chapter goes on to say that good principles for action, like good scientific theories, should have scope, precision, and depth. Table 3.1 on page 36 compares the eight Ostrom’s Principles to the Prosocial Version, and helps show they cluster into three function (first principle defines the group, next five ensure effective by balancing group and individual interest, the next support engagement, and the last allows scaling to entire system). Principles 7 and 8 are the trickiest from my perspective, because they depend on context outside the groups control. The eight Prosocial Principles are described in some detail in most of the remainder of the chapter: 1. Shared identify and purpose (replaces Clearly defined boundaries), 2. Equitable distribution of contributions and benefits (replaces Proportional equivalence between benefits and costs), 3. Fair and inclusive decision making (replaces Collective choice arrangement), 4. Monitoring agree behaviors (replaces Monitoring), 5. Graduated responding to helpful and unhelpful behavior (replaces Graduated sanctions), 6. Fast and fair conflict resolution (replaces Conflict resolution mechanism), 7. Authority to self-govern (according to principles 1-6) (replaces Minimal recognition of rights to organization), 8. Collaborative relationships with other groups (using principles 1-7) (replaces 8. Polycentric governance). The sections on multilevel framework (e.g., getting the ecosystem – multilevel nested and networked groups of groups – to value long-term cooperation over short-term competition is not easy), auxiliary design principles and exceptions to the rule (e.g., high turnover groups), and seeing the principles as a whole (e.g., doing some well at the expense of others, rather keeping them in balance, is a recipe for failure) are also quite useful. The chapter ends with a spider-diagram-exercise to rate one or more of your groups that you belong to according to the 8 CDP – low-medium-high capabilities/performance.
Chapter 4. Evolving Behavior: A Contextual Behavioral Approach
This chapter begins with insights about why learning to adopt the 8 CDP while avoiding coercion (e.g., “might makes right”) and other unhelpful behaviors is so difficult. A big challenge of day-to-day life is the ongoing social interaction dilemma that create anxiety and the need to learn to deal with these feelings and thoughts. The chapter covers human learning from an evolutionary perspective, and how people develop cognitive flexibility to deal with social dilemma. Following the path of evolution of species with neural systems, from habituation (600 million years ago – mya), classical conditioning and then operant conditioning (500 mya) with antecedent, behavior, consequence associative loops in memory, then social learning including mimicry or imitation, and contingency learning – all part of building a science of intentional change. The big advance that came next was symbolic learning processes which in human form includes the world of symbols, gestures, eye and attention tracking, language, narratives and rules, cognitive heuristics, problem-solving, a sense of self and perspective taking. The authors make the point that relational learning is a ‘two-way street’ – as entities in the external physical world and internal mental world are linked in relationships – a combinatorial explosion of possible relationships is theoretically possible. As a result people can imagine both positive and negative futures that have never existed and create plans to achieve or avoid those possibilities. Training our minds to be flexible in dealing with difficult thoughts and feelings, while moving in the direction of shared values has given rise to philosophies of life (e.g., Stoicism), religions, as well as the scientific process, including the study of psychology. As a psychological intervention, the Prosocial process builds on Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) to build cognitive and psychological flexibility in individuals and group members. Individual and group purpose is seen in terms of values (qualities displayed) and goals (to be achieved). These lead to patterns of actions within a variation, selection, and retention framework (multilevel evolutionary theory and cultural change). Key aspect of psychological flexibility to enhance collaboration are discussed, including trust, long-term thinking, social value orientation, along with exercises such as picking a guide or hero.
Part 2: Prosocial Methods
Chapter 5. Mapping Interests and Building Psychological Flexibility with the ACT Matrix
The Prosocial tool known as the ACT Matrix is introduced. The Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) described in the previous chapter based on psychological science of behavior change is the underpinning. The ACT Matric is a 2×2 type diagram that helps to integrate individual and collective interests, making often unspoken tacit knowledge explicit, and helping individuals develop psychological flexibility (a mindset of understanding and curiosity to cocreate positive futures versus anger and fear reactions to avoid possible negative futures). The matrix can be used by an individual or a (facilitated) group of people, to help map an individual’s interests or the collective’s interests. The dimensions of experience that are explored and mapped are “toward and away” as well as “outside and inside” – based on listing answers to questions that require introspection and openness to sharing, both of which can be difficult, which is why trained facilitators are suggested, and various “tricks” (tips and techniques) are shared in the book as roadblocks may be encountered using the simple Prosocial tool – the ACT Matrix. The toward-inside quadrant (lower right) question is “what matters most to you about the group?” The away-inside quadrant (lower left) question is “what difficult internal show up and get in the way of moving towards what is most important to you?” The away-outside quadrant (upper-left) question is “What can you be see to DO to avoid or control those difficult experiences?” The away-inside quadrant (upper-right) question is “What might you DO to move toward who or what is most important to you (even in the presence of difficult experiences)?” The first author illustrates with answers from his own personal experiences, which is helpful for getting a sense of the typical answers to these questions. Depending on which of the 8 CDP a group is trying to work on, after individual complete the matrix, they may pair up with a colleague to share individual perspectives, before the group discussion. The chapter contains many tips & tricks that help make the implicit explicit (speaking up), encourage listening and reflection, and develop psychological flexibility for individuals in the group. As I was reading this chapter, I was reminded in several places of the writings of Marcus Aurelius in “Meditations” on living a life according to Stoic philosophy.
Chapter 6. Modules and Pathways for the Prosocial Process
This chapter is important for facilitators of the Prosocial process. The Prosocial process for improving collaboration within and between groups has six interlocking modules: (1) Measurement for assessment and diagnosis, (2) The core design principles (8 CDP), (3) The collective matrix, (4) Goal setting, and (5) Measurements for evaluation and change. The three commonly used pathways through the modules are: (1) standard pathway with a focus on group strengths, (2) interpersonal pathway with a focus on relationships, and (3) strategic planning pathway with a focus on the future. The chapter is short, specific, and practical, and ends with some cautionary remarks, including acknowledging resistance to so-called “soft skill” development in some groups with defensive leadership, as well as the possible need for additional modules and processes in some circumstances. The authors have a website with additional tools and techniques, and they kept this chapter clear and concise. My interest in this chapter was from the perspective of thinking about additional modules and pathways for types of groups: (1) groups of people who see each other only in a work context, and who are being paid to do a narrow job (divide-and-conquer paid work), versus groups of people who may frequently see each other in day-to-day life locally and who are not being paid and improving communities or the world for family and friends (holistic unpaid work). In other words, the effects of scale matter to modules and pathways.
Chapter 7. Core Design Principle 1: Shared Identity and Purpose
The benefits of shared identity and purposes can be achieved by exploring: (1) using the individual matrix before the rest of the Prosocial process, (2) starting in small groups, (3) clarifying membership, (4) making space for the whole individual including their personal life, (5) improving communication skills, (6) ongoing sharing of reflections – not a one time and done event, (7) carefully design the ‘onboarding’ process, (8) finding ways to highlight similarity in the context of diversity, (9) understanding that shared purpose must connect both with values and goals. The benefits include increased cohesion, trust, motivation, decreased coercion, and personal benefits of less anxiety and stress. For groups struggling with identifying a shared purpose, and/or complete the collective matrix, it is often helpful to introduce perspective taking exercises, and think about: (1) the future of the group together, (2) think about the past or founding of the group, (3) think about important times or event, in then and now exercises, and (4) imaging other people from past members to anticipated future members.
Chapter 8. Core Design Principle 2: Equitable Distribution of Contributions and Benefits
Fairness is a hard topic to discuss in groups; people worry about sounding selfish, being unkind, or triggering conflicts. The first helpful insight for me reading this chapter was the two types of fairness studied in the research literature: (1) Distributional fairness (about resources) and (2) Procedural fairness (about inclusion, rules, and speed of conflict resolution). The second helpful insight dealt with the distinctions between three social norms related to fairness: (1) Equity (I earned it – equal to contribution), (2) Equality (My turn – equal opportunity), and (3) Emergency (I need it most – equal outcomes). The topic of fairness is easier to discuss sometimes when (1) improved communication and listening skills are practiced first on other topics, (2) perspective-taking skills are fostered, (3) increased cognitive-flexibility is encouraged, (4) ‘care labor’ is acknowledged and valued, (5) the focus is on roles and tasks and not on personalities and individuals, (6) after action reviews, (7) surveys, (8) involving more people in decision making.
Chapter 9. Core Design Principle 3: Fair and Inclusive Decision Making
The chapter is interesting because the case study is about the professional association associated with this book! The benefits of inclusive decision making include: (1) More developed, skillful group members, (2) Improved engagement, (3) Better decisions, (4) Improved cooperation and performance, (5) More resilient systems, (6) improved well-being and vitality. Nevertheless hierarchies (for decision making) persist. Follow-the-leader removes a lot of fear of conflict and retribution. Leaders can (1) provide direction, protection, and social order, (2) their self-interest maintains the hierarchy, (3) they fear losing power, (4) they convince followers of the downsides of consensus building, (5) they are less aware of risks, become more impulsive, and show less empathy. Models of inclusive decision making that can be explored include: (1) Autocratic decision making, (2) Consultative leadership, (3) Facilitative leadership (4) Consent-based decision making (agree, abstain, disagree, block), and (5) Consensus decision making. Decision making in traditional organizations connect to (1) personal/collective goal conflict and alignments, (2) delegation processes, (3) information transparency, (4) roles and stakeholder perspectives, (5) quality of meetings (encouraging ‘loyal dissent’, managing people who dominate, etc.), and (6) talking about power. When decisions are made, describing who made them and why is important shared understanding; anything less, breeds unaccountability.
Chapter 10. Core Design Principle 4: Monitoring Agreed Behaviors
The benefits of monitoring (transparency) include: (1) Increased prosociality, (2) Decreased cheating, (3) Increased motivation and shared identity, and (4) Improved coordination. However, monitoring can go wrong if done (1) to the wrong extent, either too much or too little, (2) ineffectively, gathering wrong information, and (3) coercively, not enhancing mutual learning but enforcing behavior. To implement monitoring well, a calendar-based approach may be helpful, so consider these suggestions: (1) Daily Check-in Meetings, (2) Weekly Reflections, (3) Monthly Goal Setting, (4) Quarterly Strategic Objective Setting, and (5) Annual Review & Strategic Brainstorming. Psychological flexibility (curious awareness rather than judgmental attitudes) can help support a culture of healthy monitoring and transparency.
Chapter 11. Core Design Principle 5: Graduated Responding to Helpful and Unhelpful Behavior
Groups that support self-control (cognitive flexibility) stimulate more cooperative behaviors, whereas groups that allow control of others (coercion) often encounter uncooperative behaviors. Sanctions (up to and including expulsion) can be helpful, but treated with care since: (1) threats can induce flight-or-fight responses, (2) diminish well-being and engagement, (3) diminish trust, (4) inefficient supervision tasks, and (5) backlash against role that administers sanctions. Healthy patterns encourage (1) positive social interactions first and foremost, (2) work to acknowledge and meet individual needs and interests, (3) and avoid destructive in-group competition. Effective responding begins with (1) reorienting to purpose, (2) getting prepared personally, (3) stepping into the shoes of the other, and (4) choosing a response matched to the seriousness of the situation (not over or under), and (5) implementing the response (consequences).
Chapter 12. Core Design Principle 6: Fast and Fair Conflict Resolution
Understanding the differences between healthy and unhealthy conflict in groups, as well as task conflict and relationship conflicts provide the opening foundation for this chapter. The integrative approach to conflict resolutions as a generate-test-and-debug pattern that starts with separating the people from the problem, focusing on the shared interest of the roles, developing many options, and evaluating the options with objective criteria – perhaps creating additional options as evaluation reveals new insights. The tools for effectively shifting perspectives were especially interesting – engaging imagination, questioning others, listening and reflecting, and reversing roles to explore and take other perspectives. Guidelines for effective conflict management should include both principles (e.g., close to the source) and processes (e.g., escalation).
Chapter 13, Core Design Principle 7: Authority to Self-Govern
By my estimation, the most challenging prosocial concern is avoiding excessive outside interference (to other groups) and proving responsible at self-control (to your own group and other groups). The three examples presented in this chapter deal with healthcare, business and international aid, and the military.
Chapter 14. Core Design Principle 8: Collaborative Relations with Other Groups
Polycentric governance (part of the Prosocial approach) aspires to scale independence, working for small groups and larger groups of groups. Michel Polanyi identified science (truth – data-driven), art (beauty), religion (transcendent truth – elder wisdom), and law (justice) as polycentric in nature with different drivers.
Chapter 15. Goal Setting for Action
The important distinction between performance goals with a focus on the outcomes in routine systems and learning goals with a focus on experimentation in complex systems is introduced. Characteristics of good performance goals are that they are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound). Characteristics of good learning goals may also include a group voting on a prioritization of possible experiments and a review process for interpreting the results. For learning goals, the idea of failing fast and forward to maintain a positive momentum may also come into play in certain circumstances.
Conclusion: The More Beautiful World That Our Hearts Know Is Possible
Imagining a better, more collaborative world using an understanding of Ostrom’s Design Principles (updated in the Prosocial process informed by the variation-selection-and-retention mechanism of multiscale evolution), and then to nudge humanity in that hopeful direction, is what the authors have aspired to help readers to strive for in groups small and large.
Endnotes
Hardin’s (1968) article in Science on the tragedy of the commons stood out as an important follow-up read, especially Hardin’s views on coercion as regulation. Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, and Roche (2001) book on RFT (Relational Frame Theory) and the notion of motivational augments seemed quite interesting as well.
References
Bartlett’s (2016) medium post about bootstrapping a bossless organization in 3 easy steps looks like an interesting read. Guinote (2017) journal article on how power affects people might shed some light on when power corrupts and when it does not.
About the Authors
Dr. Atkins (Australian Catholic University – ACU) does research and practice as director of the Prosocial Institute. Dr. Wilson (Binghamton University) is president of The Evolution Institute and he worked with Elinor Ostrom. Dr. Hayes (University of Nevada, Reno) is past president and lifetime achievement award winner from the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT). Dr. Ryan (ACU) wrote the foreword is co-developer of self-determination theory (SDT).
Select Quotes
BiblioA2019 Atkins WB, Wilson DS, Hayes SC (2019) Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups
URL: https://www.amazon.com/Prosocial-Evolutionary-Productive-Equitable-Collaborative/dp/1684030242
Via_Ray_Fisk
Quotes:
“Prosocial behavior is generally understood as the act of getting along and cooperating with others.” (pg. 4, Ch. 1).
“What’s good for your nation can be bad for the world. The general rule is this: adaptation at any level of a multilevel hierarchy requires a process of selection at that level – and it tends to be undermined by selection at lower levels. Or, as David, once of the book’s authors, concluded in an article written with Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, ‘Selfishness beats altruism within group. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.’”(pg. 13, Ch. 1)
“Polycentric governance [of commons]: Beyond [hierarchies] regulation and markets…. There are two major forms of large scale-governance that violate the principles of polycentric governance and are also diametrically opposed to each other: laissez-faire (consisting of privatized resources controlled within markets) and centralized planning (consisting of top-down regulation, say by government or a group of experts)…. Both approaches have strengths that an improved form of governance should retain but also have grave weaknesses that need to be corrected… Markets privilege [short-term] desires over long-term interests… Hierarchies of power all ultimately rest upon coercive powers… But one of the most fundamental needs of human beings is to be able to endorse one’s own actions as volitional. And literally thousands of empirical studies have shown that vitality and creativity dampen when people’s behavior is controlled by fear… Both of these views have taken attention away from a much older form of governance, that of the commons. Ostrom’s work has brought the attention of many to the commons… ” (pp. 28-29, Ch. 2);
“Stephen Covey once said, ‘There are three constants in life… change, choice, and principles.’” (pg. 35, Ch. 3);
“Day-to-day life is an ongoing ‘social dilemma’ – a creative tension between our own interests and the interests of others…. We live inside multilevel selection.” (pg. 50, Ch. 4);
“The oldest (600 million years old or more) form of learning (that is, behavior change) is habituation, in which repeated irrelevant sensory stimulation leads to a reduction in responding.” (pg. 51, Ch. 4);
“Imagining positive futures that have never been and mentally comparing the steps that might give rise to them is enormously supportive of human progress. But people also use the exact same skills to imagine frightening worlds that also have never been, and feel overwhelmed or incapacitated as a result.” (pg. 55, Ch. 4);
“In summary, symbolic learning is a very recent form of learning that has completely transformed the lived experiences of human beings. Once we become verbal, we spend the rest of our life evaluating, comparing, naming, wishing, and imagining. Technologies from the printing press to the Internet and smartphone have put this form of behavioral and cultural evolution into overdrive so that our lives are increasingly “virtual” and disconnected from the direct physical contingencies of existence. Psychological Flexibility. Because symbolic (that is relational) learning is key to our development as humans but leads to both positive and negative effects everywhere we look, a primary task is to put this kind of learning on a leash so that it can be used in a more thoughtful fashion in a program of behavior change…. Learning how to do this is central to cognitive flexibility, which involves consciously moving in the direction of values even in the presence of difficult thoughts and feelings. Psychological flexibility is improved by several methods of psychological intervention, but it was first deliberately targeted by acceptance and commitment training (or ACT, said as a single work, not initials). The Prosocial process includes several ACT methods that are meant to help motivate individual members to participate and learn to cooperate…” (pg. 56, Ch. 4);
“…the matrix… allows you to integrate individual and collective interests within and between groups, work out what needs to be done, and become aware of all the often unspoken ways the group might hijack its noble goals and undermine its chances of achieving them,” (pg. 73, Ch. 5);
“Outside/Inside: Human beings care about, and worry about, a lot more than animals thanks to our capacity to imagine and tell inspiring and terrifying stories about the past, present, and future. As we explored in the last chapter, humans live in two worlds simultaneously: the world of actual physical contacts and causes, and the world of language and the mind. We can transform the meaning of any situation through the way we relate to our experience. Winning the lottery can become painful when it causes strife with relatives, and having a leg blown off by a landmine or experiencing cancer can become a source of meaning and joy when the processes of survival and recovery awaken one to the beauty of life. These are not hyperbole – these are actual examples.” (pp. 75-76, Ch. 5);
“Even though the individual matrix is an excellent icebreaker in its own right, sometimes groups need to first engage in other trust-building exercises, such as shared projects and social events, before they can even begin to work with the individual matrix.” (pg. 101, Ch. 6);
“Enlightened leaders have long appreciated that understanding and endorsing a shared purpose empowers group members to act without being explicitly told what to do. When purpose becomes the boss, there is a shift from coercive ‘power-over’ relationships to cooperative ‘power-with’ relationships, and the team is pulled, not pushed, toward the future.” (pg. 101, Ch. 7)
“Fairness, like health, is an emergent property of well-functioning system. That said we decided to keep it as a separate principle for two reasons. First, fairness is so important that we’ve found it is useful to have a placeholder in the Prosocial process for discussing fairness in groups when doing so is really needed. Second, fairness is a much more common issue at the level og groups of groups, where it is easier to fall into competitive, judgmental relationships that seek to exploit [monetize] others rather than cooperate with them. In this chapter we reviewed some key distinctions that help shift one’s understanding of fairness as a fuzzy, emotion-laden term to a more precise and workable issue within and between groups.” (pp. 133-134, Ch. 8)
“The Association for Contextual Behavioral Sciences (ACBS) peer-reviewed acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) trainers community was formed in 2003 as a means to disseminate findings from the science of behavior change to the world.” (pg. 135, Ch. 9)
“Specifically, we’ve drawn upon insights from sociocracy, Holocracy, and Laloux’s work on reinventing organizations ; resources such as Tim Hartnett’s book Consensus-Oriented Decision Making, and Sam Kaner’s Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making; and organizations such as Enspiral and Gini that make use of inclusive decision-making practices in organizational contexts.” (pg. 142, Ch. 9)
“As with all the principles, monitoring agreed behaviors can be done in a way that is more or less flexible and helpful…. Earlier we explored how psychological flexibility involves a kind of open, receptive, and curious awareness of one’s own experiences. Instead of getting angry, depressed, or anxious about one’s own behavior, mindfulness-based therapies encourage people to focus more on simply noticing experiences and then acting wisely to change that which can be changed while accepting that which cannot be changed… This move toward mindful awareness of one’s own experience can just as easily be applied to awareness of others. And in groups it’s possible to build a culture of open curiosity rather than judgmental awareness of behavior…. Instead of coercive monitoring that seeks to judge, criticize, and control, noticing behavior is more functional… [helpful, thank-you or less helpful, so what to try next] ” (pg. 158, Ch. 10).
“Sanctions are much more effective in groups that have effective approaches to conflict management (core design principle 6) in place. Responding to unhelpful behavior is often emotionally challenging. In our work with groups, we’ve found that fear of conflict often drives either excessively harsh or excessively avoidant responses to unhelpful behaviors. Having good skills and social practices in place to manage conflict is critical for a group to effectively respond to unhelpful behavior… Finally, psychological flexibility supports all the core design principles. When we can absorb the emotional challenge of growth and direct attention toward how to create value-based habits, group members are more likely to engage in all the principles, and this synergistic effect can become self-amplifying pattern of evolutionary development.” (pg. 168, Ch. 11).
“If a group is to find its way through conflicts, it needs to ensure it has effective capacity at three levels: (1) Interpersonal skills such as listening well and speaking assertively, not aggressively, (2) Personal skills such as emotional regulation and perspective taking, and (3) Group-level agreements on principles and processes to manage conflict efficiently and effectively.” (pg. 177, Ch. 12)
“When Elinor Ostrom studied common-pool resource groups, the need for local authority emerged as so important that she made it a core design principal in its own right. By her reckoning, 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. She encountered many examples of groups that were capable of managing their own common-pool resources but failed for lack of sufficient autonomy. Core design principle 7 (CPD 7), authority to self-govern, is about the group not the individuals within the group. Specifically, it is about the group’s capacity to manage its own affairs without excessive interference from outside. ‘Authority’ can mean the power or right to give orders, make decision, and enforce obedience. But it can also mean the capacity and power to author one’s own experience. We mean it in this latter way.” (pg. 190, Ch. 13)
“The principles we’ve covered so far help solve thee ‘me versus us’ problem within groups, but if we’re to scale this approach to enhance whole systems of cooperation, we need to address how ‘us versus them’ can be reconciled.” (pg. 199, Ch. 14)
“Why Goals Matter: Performance and Learning Goals… Goals are important for groups because they help them coordinate action in a shared direction, and because they motivate people to initiative and sustain effort, even when the going gets tough. But, done well, goals can also serve another critical purpose: they can help people learn and adapt over time. It’s usually helpful to talk about the distinction between performance goals and learning goals with groups. Performance goals are focused on the outcomes to be achieved… Such goals are perfectly reasonable and helpful when everybody in the system knows exactly what to do and can predict how every other part of the system will react… But we have repeatedly emphasized through this book how human systems are complex adaptive systems, evolving on multiple levels, with nonlinear cause and effect between agents and levels. As we become increasingly densely interconnected with one another the extent of complexity also increases. Whereas twenty or thirty years ago solving problems of coordination and cooperation might have required simple problem-solving and goal setting, now it more often than not requires a more learning-oriented approach, experimenting with trying out things to see how they work, and remaining open to flexible changing directions in the face of feedback from the system… A learning goal is focused less on what must be achieved and more on learning how to get to that outcome. In the context of the Prosocial process, learning goals often mean experimenting with different approaches to putting the principles into action…” (pg. 209, Ch. 15)
“Our work is about both thinking globally and acting locally. Participants are uplifted not just by the toolkit, but by a new shared story about the nature of humanity — a story that provides realistic hope that we can do something about our challenges, locally and globally, by cultivating shared purpose while also managing the inevitability of self-interest in cooperative situations… In this new story, human beings can develop and sustain shared commitments to improving the quality of our relationships, conversations, and agreements so as to ensure that self-interest is protected but cannot dominate collective interest. If we had to summarize in a sentence the journey we’ve taken in this book, we’d say it this way: Complex adaptive systems of cooperation can grow out of more psychologically flexible people and environments, in which small groups, and groups of groups, create shared and principled agreements that establish trust and satisfy individual and group interests. Or, perhaps more poetically, we can foster cooperation within and cooperation without, by restraining selfishness within and without, in the service of human values at all scales…. The World Our Hearts Imagine… Imagine for a moment your ideal world, restrained only by the finite reality of organisms that live and die as part of the natural world.” (pg. 222, Conclusion);
This book and review
First full skim of book was 20220124.
Second detailed reread was from 20251123 to 200260220.
Started writing the review on 20260322 and finished on 20260405.
Additional Notes
How long did it take me to read the book?
It took four years (2022-2026) for me to carefully read Atkins, Wilson, Hayes (2022) “Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science To Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups.”
After skimming Part 1 in 2022, I thought of what aspects of the groups that I was part of that I would most like to improve, and dove into the chapter on the specific Core Design Principle of most interest (“Fair and Inclusive Decision Making”) to see what was there. The lens provided was useful for understanding situations from new perspectives. Next, I spent a few years studying individual chapters (design principles) while thinking about the groups that I belonged to and how they might be improved.
Only after reading a great book about building a non-coercive society (Deming & Hamel (2025) “Blueprint for a Spacefaring Civilization: The Science of Volition”) did I feel motivated and ready read “Prosocial” from start to finish in detail in 2025, which I then did, extracting useful information about the commons (as different from markets and hierarchies), multilevel evolution (as a more foundational view of cultural evolutional), and more described briefly below.
A bit expensive, a long and hard read, but definitely what the world needs now to improve individual and collective cognition for collaboration and multi-scale cultural evolution, in hierarchy, market, and commons…
Getting rid of coercion and becoming more “prosocial” will require some innovations for sure – markets, institutions, commons – all have lessons to share.
How do I read books?
My style of reading a book is to skim a whole book on the day that I receive it. A typical book is around 250 pages, requires a careful reading of any foreword, authors biography, acknowledgements, and table of contents to think about why am I reading this book, what do I hope to learn (what are my learning goals), what is likely to be most challenging and difficult for me to learn, what is going to be easiest to understand. I also look at endnotes, references, index, and any closing comments, refining what I expect to learn, and what might be new, interesting, and related to my purpose in reading the book. All this can take from 15 minutes to 30 minutes, depending on the amount of material to skim and study. I also make notes if needed, in the margins, and in the back of the books with the date, page, and keywords.
Next, starting at chapter one and going to the last chapter, I look at every page briefly, reading the first sentence of each paragraph, and briefly scanning the page for interesting words, including words I may not know, as well as names of people, places, and things I do not know. Sometimes I will take the time to make a note in the margins, and sometimes a note at the end of the book.
Turning every page of a 250 page book, takes me on average 2-4 seconds per page, so anywhere from 500 to 1000 seconds, or roughly between 10 and 20 minutes.
My first read (skim) of any book takes typically well under an hour, and establishes my learning goals and basic familiarity with the author(s), their reason for writing the book, and my reason for reading it.
My approach to reading books is based on a book my grandmother Roberta Lade Spohrer Belgard gave me when I was in high school, called “How To Read A Book” (Adler MJ, Van Doren C (1972) “How to Read a Book”). My love of books goes back to my earliest childhood, and my parents (and grandmother Roberta) had lots of books. Lots of story books, but also I recall books on drafting (precise drawings), the arts, science, technology, history, biographies of famous people, and more. My parents bought us kids three encyclopedia sets as well – The Book of Knowledge series was my favorite (red and white bindings) and covered most everything including the natural and human made worlds, but there was also two concise sets one a pale blue that had a lot on science (“The Book of Science”), and one a dark blue (Groliers) which had a lot on history, people and places. I recall when my high school guidance counselor (Mr. Arsenault?) called me to his office (out of an advanced biology class (Ms. Jane Kimball), and maybe my math teacher Mr. Gary Tibbets was in that office as well) to tell my about my SAT scores. He then asked where I plan to apply to college. I said maybe the University of Maine at Orono. Then he handed me an application to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and suggested I should apply. As soon as I got home, I ran to the encyclopedias bookcase near the stairs in our den and looked up MIT. I read “top science and technology university in the world” and thought, “that sounds pretty good to me.” I needed a letter of reference from a teacher and a someone from the community. I was afraid to ask for adults outside my family for help, but the instructions said no family members could write the recommendation, so I mustered the courage. Not sure it if was Mr. Tibbets or Ms. Kimball, or both for the teacher, but my mother Arlene’s good friend and neighbor, Joyce Getchell, wrote a short recommendation on a piece of scrap paper in her kitchen – “Jimmy is a good boy. He goes to church. He studies and works hard. He gets good grades in school. He is a Boy Scout. He is working on his Eagle badge. We will miss him a lot when he goes to college.” My student essay was on “Parsimony in Nature.”