UNDERSTANDING THE BENEFITS OF COOPERATION:

Understanding the need for and benefits of cooperation has everything to do with why some groups of people survive, prosper, and are more successful than other groups. Focusing on that need for cooperation is a central tenet of many forms of conflict resolution. Two theories are important to understand in this realm: one is the idea that cooperation, not competition, is most productive in social interactions and human tasks; and two, cooperation is a human core capacity we are hard-wired to understand and use.

Kurt Lewin, Morton Deutsch, and the international social psychology movement over the past sixty years have turned the Darwinian theory of “survival of the fittest” on its head as it relates to conflict resolution. The trend in the past was to believe that competition always moved humans in a long-term positive direction while now it is commonly accepted, and theorized through extensive research, that cooperation is more natural and works better to resolve conflicts and create conflict management systems (Deutsch, Workshop Notes). Taken from his workshop notes in 2004, Morton Deutsch said the following:

"The focus of much of my work in the field of conflict resolution has been centered on the question: What determines whether a conflict takes a constructive or destructive course? After much research and thought, I came to the following conclusions:

1.) A conflict is likely to take a constructive course if it is viewed as a mutual problem to be worked on together in a cooperative process; a conflict is likely to take a destructive course if it is defined as a win-lose conflict in which the conflicting parties engage in a competitive process to determine who wins and who loses.

2.) The typical effects of a successful cooperative process when introduced into a conflict, that is not already strongly determined, tend to induce a cooperative, constructive process of conflict resolution. Such typical effect includes: open, honest communication; friendliness and readiness to be helpful to one another; enhancement of the other’s power and well being; and mutual trust and trustworthiness. In contrast, the typical effects of a competitive process tend to induce a destructive, competitive process of conflict resolution. These typical effects include: communication designed to deceive; hostility and obstructiveness directed toward the other; attempts to weaken the power of the other and to keep or place the other in an inferior position; mutual suspicion and untrustworthiness. (Workshop Notes 2004)"

Deutsch’s life work is relevant to this study as it solidly outlines our common human propensity to cooperate in order to be most efficient, survive as a species, and flourish. Other researchers take this argument further and suggest that many primates, including humans, understand from a very early age, maybe from birth, that cooperation is a key to survival.