Ernst Strüngmann Forum

Asaf Bachrach, Kevin Bauer, Jenna Bednar, Eric D. Beinhocker, Johan Bollen, Federica Carugati, Esther Chevrot-Bianco, A. C. C. Coolen, Tamas David-Barrett, Simon DeDeo, Dana Dolghin, L. Zachary DuBois, Ismael T. Freire, Dorthe Døjbak Håkonsson, Rebecca D. Hardin, Sebastian Kahl, Heidi Keller, Mette Løvschal, Julia R. Lupp, Jônatas Manzolli, George E. Marcus, Marcia L. McLain, Stephanie Musgrave, Melody N. Ndzenyuiy, J. Chris Nierstrasz, Raul Pacheco-Vega, Scott E. Page, Bhavani R. Rao, Andreas Roepstorff, Karthik Sankaranarayanan, Dennis J. Snower, Sidney Strauss, Justin Sulik, Veena Suresh, Kristian Tylén, Sander E. van der Leeuw, Paul F. M. J. Verschure, Alicia von Schenk, Ferdinand von Siemens

This volume reports on a discourse that looked at the phenomenon of collaboration: how it arises and why it fails. The impetus for this topic began in the summer of 2018, when Andreas Roepstorff (a social anthropologist working at the intersection of anthropology and clinical medicine) contacted me to discuss the possibility of developing a proposal on collaboration. Around the same time, Paul Verschure (a neuroscientist working toward a unified theory of mind, brain, and body through synthetic methods) was interested in doing the same. To assess whether individual needs, interests, and goals aligned, we arranged to meet, and it soon became clear that there was ample common ground to develop a proposal. After several rounds of interactions with our Scientific Advisory Board, the proposal was approved and an organizing committee was convened.

Joining us on the committee were Jenna Bednar (political science, analysis of institutions), Bhavani Rao (social science, gender equality, women’s empowerment), and Ferdinand von Siemens (economics, psychology). Together, we worked to put into place a framework that would support an extended, multidisciplinary discussion. Our aim was to convene ca. 40 researchers

• to explore the commonalities and differences in collaboration as observed in biological, social, and technological systems,
• to identify core drivers of and constraints on collaboration and the conditions for its emergence, stabilization, and fractionation,
• to outline putative generic architectures for processes of collaboration, and
• to model how commons may be created, consumed, and destroyed during collaboration.

The committee’s work involved multiple dimensions. First, four working groups were created to address different aspects of the topic. Group 1’s charge was to examine the purpose of collaboration: Why is it that we collaborate? Group 2 analyzed how collaboration unfolds by looking for core components that underpin the architecture of collaborative systems. Group 3 addressed why agents even collaborate, which included an in-depth review of implicit and explicit norms. Group 4 sought to understand the conditions under which collaboration breaks down.

Next, specific types of expertise were identified to address the topics. Since productive discussion at a Forum is contingent on many elements, great attention was given to achieving diversity among the invitees, as well as a willingness to question one’s own views and engage in “blue-sky” thinking.

The framework put into place by the committee was meant to guide, not restrict discussions. It is also important to note that a Forum unfolds over an extended period of time: the most active stage involving everyone starts approximately three months before the in-person, week-long think tank in Frankfurt and ends once the resulting group reports are finalized, normally four months after the Forum. Since experts from multiple, sometimes divergent backgrounds are invited to a Forum, the framework must provide a stable starting point for the discourse to evolve. To create such “common ground,” background papers were commissioned by the committee on key topics.

Julia R. Lupp, Director, Ernst Strüngmann Forum
Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies
Ruth-Moufang-Str. 1, 60438 Frankfurt am Main, Germany
https://esforum.de/

Through its ability to collaborate, Homo sapiens has become the dominant species on this planet. Traces of this ability can be observed in the remains of Neolithic construction projects, such as Göbekli Tepe from 9000 BCE (Turkey) with its mysterious large-scale circular structures. Comparable collective building projects on each continent characterize this period. The earliest written records describe the ability of humans to overcome their differences and work together toward common goals, as in Homer’s Iliad (800 BCE), where Greek leaders needed to put aside their differences to achieve the shared objective of conquering Troy and recovering Helen. Millennia of human collaboration have left an indelible mark on Earth systems, ushering in the Anthropocene. This era, characterized by global biogeochemical, technological, economic, and sociocultural alterations, has led to unforeseen yet undeniable stress on populations, ecosystems, and planetary systems. Both the COVID-19 pandemic and present global conditions—from armed conflicts to escalating humanitarian crises and political polarization—demonstrate amply why we need to understand the phenomenon of collaboration. This knowledge may well be critical to our long-term survival. The persistent success of human collaboration is now creating conditions for its failure, suggesting that we might have reached the end of the road for human collaboration as we know it and must reinvent it following our current predicament.

The stability and sustainability of social and Earth systems depends on realizing stable collaboration dynamics. Yet how, and by which means, collaboration is achieved and maintained is not clearly understood; neither are the conditions nor processes that lead to its breakdown or failure. Indeed, as this volume illustrates, the exact meaning, connotation, and use of “collaboration” are unclear, as is its difference from notions like “cooperation” or “collusion.” In this distinction, differences between intent, morality, legality, and outcomes matter. This suggests that we do not yet have the proper concepts to describe and understand this powerful, complex, orchestrated form of human collective behavior. Ironically, as the need for effective collaboration is more urgent than ever, we lack a common understanding of the concept. This is a common problem at the frontiers of knowledge and not automatically an invitation to a potentially endless concept analysis. Still, it shows that we have barely scratched the surface of understanding this mission-critical phenomenon, highlighting the need for collective reflection and action.

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Abstract

Observations from both naturalistic and experimental contexts reveal substantial collaborative abilities in our closest living primate relatives. Great apes flexibly coordinate behavior, mutually communicate to negotiate the start and end of joint social activities, and demonstrate group-specific patterns of collaboration. The basis of these abilities, however, is debated, with some arguing for fundamental discontinuities in the cognitive and motivational underpinnings of collaboration in humans compared to other primates. Continued research will help to clarify these issues and illuminate key questions, such as the extent to which collaboration can be learned, how norms facilitate collaboration, and how communication and collaboration are linked. These efforts will further clarify the mechanisms that support and stabilize collaboration as well as the factors that may have favored the emergence of expanded collaborative proclivities in the human lineage.

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Long-distance trade between Europe, the East Indies, and East Asia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would not have been possible without extensive collaboration between Europeans and Asians. Although some Asian rulers chose not to engage with the Dutch East India Company (VOC) or to restrict their interactions solely to trade, some collaborated fully, thereby setting into motion a trajectory that ultimately led to Dutch domination in the area. However, neither party would have defined domination as the desired outcome at the onset. After an initial collaboration was established, mutual dependency sustained mutual gains and led parties either to reinforce their bargaining positions through sustained collaboration or to break free and search for other collaborative partners. Colonial control became possible once the initial cooperation created a codependency between parties, which led to the construction of further, mutually beneficial goals. Collaboration was not organized in a “commons,” but through a system of a writing down a formal virtualization of a shared goal or mutual future. Once the VOC had the power to select with whom they would collaborate and had a dominant position in stipulating the outcomes, colonial exploitation became possible.

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To broaden our understanding of the intricate dynamics that drive collaboration, this chapter examines the complex and contentious history of the Jewish Council of Amsterdam (Joodse Raad)and its relationship to the Nazi bureaucracy, the police, and the Dutch administration during World War II. The institutional history of the Jewish Council and the challenges it faced at that time offer insight into the moral dilemmas and destructive consequences of coercion and collusion that created a collaboration dynamic. Collaboration arose because there was an imbalance in power between the German authorities and the Jewish Council, and it was fueled by subsequent efforts by the Council to navigate its expectations of the collapsing societal order. The Council’s limited capacity to influence the Nazi decisions, despite the illusion of choice, exacerbated conditions of oppression. Its strategic rationale for collaboration was rooted in the uncertainty about the future and a desire to mitigate the severity of Nazi policies toward the Jewish community—a strategy that opens up numerous questions about the perils of mitigating risks via dialogue.

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Collaboration in synthetic systems can inform our understanding of collaboration as a natural phenomenon. A general overview of how collaboration has been studied in the human evolutionary behavioral sciences is presented, and it is argued that further synthesis is needed across the different levels of explanation. At present, two main issues prevent such a synthesis: (a) the current gap between proximate accounts of collaboration from the cognitive sciences and the ultimate levels of explanation from the evolutionary sciences, and (b) methodological limitations which inhibit joint study of collaboration at different levels of description. Synthetic collaborative systems (e.g., robotics and artificial intelligence) can help to address these issues. A unified research program centered on synthetic collaboration provides a way to expand understanding of human and animal collaboration, to design and study human–machine collaboration, as well as to investigate purely synthetic forms of collaboration between intelligent machines. Here, current research is reviewed that employs synthetic methodologies across different fields, the implications of developing synthetic collaborative agents are discussed, and an approach is proposed to study both natural and synthetic collaboration, under the name of collaborative cybernetics.

Science requires an almost complete openness to all ideas. On the other hand, it requires the most rigorous and uncompromising skepticism. —Carl Sagan (1995)

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As discussed in the Introduction, prior to the Forum we conducted a number of interviews to gain insights into how people collaborate. This chapter summarizes people’s attempt to clarify the phenomenon. In each interview, we posed “simple” questions—What is collaboration? What is it good for—answering these questions proved more difficult than one might imagine.

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Community-level self-help groups (SHGs) provide cultural, economic, and social benefits to underprivileged communities. In various areas of South Asia, people have historically engaged in informal support systems, saving and borrowing as a collective. Following Ostrom’s design principles of common pool resource management, the capital generated by an SHG can be viewed as a common pool resource that is effective in supporting sustainable collaborations. In 2004, after the devasting Asian tsunami that severely impacted the region, a community-based organization, known as the Amrita Self Reliance Education and Employment (AmritaSREE), was established to support women and their communities. This chapter analyzes the way AmritaSREE works to create SHGs and assesses elements that contribute to enhance as well as break down collaboration.

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Social interaction strongly relies on the existence of a relationship between two or more partners, some amount of conversational exchange, and attention by all partners to that exchange. Collaboration falls largely in the framework of social interactions but harbors more leverage in that it encompasses culturally permeated sets of practices and values, leading to heterogeneity in its manifestations across groups. What one group of people regards as a way of life, another conceives as a formalized collaboration. Despite its presence in multidisciplinary reports, the role of culture in shaping collaborative interactions has been underestimated, as have the ways that collaboration influences modes of life. Research based on WEIRD societal values fail to contextualize collaboration in other cultures. This chapter explores the cultural nature of collaboration using examples from the Nso’ people from the Northwest Region of Cameroon. Collaborative childcare and the network of interpersonal relationships within the Nso’ community demonstrate how collaborative systems differ across cultural boundaries. The need to ensure inclusive viewpoints is highlighted when collaboration strategies are explored. From both psychological and anthropological viewpoints, culture plays a significant role and must be included when attempts are made to understand human behavior and belief systems.

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Music is ubiquitous in our lives, offering us a way to express our innermost emotions and communicate meaning. The messages that we relay to each other through music are not fixed in time or space, as meaning can be transmitted across generations as well as geographical distances. As defined for this Forum, music embodies the basic elements of collaboration: it is a dynamic process involving multiple agents who pursue, through cooperation, a mutual goal. Yet other attributes in music exist to influence the actions and relationships between agents, and these play a role in creating, sustaining, or hindering collaboration. Diverse examples outlined in this chapter provide insight into how collaboration emerges in and through music.

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This chapter summarizes the insights that emerged from the interviews conducted prior to the Forum. The first section summarizes the responses to our general question: What properties and traits do agents have to create and sustain collaboration? Thereafter, examples of collaboration brought forth in the interviews are described.

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Large-scale collaborations with non-kin are a unique feature of human societies and foundational to human civilization. Individual relationships with collectives can be thought of as “social contracts.” This chapter argues that perceptions of social contract fairness are essential for effective large-scale collaboration and that factors likely to create perceptions of fairness are subject to empirical analysis. Drawing on empirical behavioral and social science literature, the chapter proposes nine dimensions of social contract fairness. Each dimension is distinct, imperfectly substitutable, and universal, although with individual and cultural variations in interpretations and preference weightings. Here, these nine dimensions are applied to the breakdown in political collaboration in the United States. It is argued that for large segments of the U.S. population, all nine dimensions of social contract fairness were broken during the mid-1970s–2010s. The chapter concludes with thoughts on social contract repair and further research into perceptions of social contract fairness.

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Science is the expression of methods, techniques, and ideas shared by a community. Based on decades of experience working within multidisciplinary teams that have focused on achieving transdisciplinary goals, this chapter analyzes factors that contribute and detract from collaboration (innovation, perspectives, and commons). The perspective taken is that of complex adaptive systems, initially developed by a transdisciplinary team for the ARCHAEOMEDES project. Insights are presented from this cumulative work, and a conceptual, practical framework is proposed that can be shared and used to realize clearly set goals and avoid disappointment.

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Most of life’s challenges are collective challenges, to be addressed through collective action that can be successful only when people act beyond enlightened self-interest. This is the opposite of the methodological individualism that underlies mainstream economic and political analysis. To address collective challenges, we need to coordinate our collective capacities at the scale and scope at which a challenge occurs. As challenges will vary over time, often unpredictably, our capacities are continually in danger of becoming decoupled from these challenges. Thus, human survival and flourishing depend on how successful we are in recoupling our capacities with our challenges. Such recoupling invariably involves not just cooperation (working with others to achieve one’s own goals), but also collaboration (working with others toward common goals). When individuals collaborate, they participate in the purposes and welfare of the social groups in which they are embedded. Recoupling deserves to become a central guide for public policy, business strategy, and civic action.

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Collaborations serve a variety of ends and purposes. Most collaborations can be classified as one-shot or ongoing. The architectures within which collaborations occur (i.e., the rules, roles, processes, information structures, and incentives) matter. Having the right people with the requisite skills is not sufficient, particularly for complex tasks. Given the enormous set of possible architectures, finding an effective one requires forethought along with knowledge of the culture as well as the task at hand. Within a collaborative architecture, two types of adaptation occur: the participants learn and, often, the architecture adapts. In view of this, we should consider collaborations as coevolutionary processes.

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Collaboration is a complex process, deeply rooted in trust, aligned objectives, and the ability to navigate the intricacies of human dynamics. The process is held together by trust or possibly fear, as in the “cage fights” of high-energy physics experiments, where all parties are “condemned to one another” (S. de Jong). To guide the collaborative process, Eva Wiecko establishes effective lines of communication and builds trust with organizational leaders. Fresh perspectives are brought to the attention of organizational leaders, adjusted to the depth of the relationship and the assessment of how open one can be in giving feedback. In all cases, deliberate communication is used to ensure that feedback is not perceived as offensive, with attention given to being sensitive to the hierarchical and cultural nuances of the organizations and people involved. This entails ensuring that the collaborative project is executable within a certain timeline and that difficult issues that may endanger the process itself are only communicated when necessary. Interestingly, the shift to remote video meetings has helped to dismantle some established cultural rituals, making meetings more content-driven and less hierarchical. Over time, this might contribute to a more meritocratic culture.

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This chapter explores collaboration from the perspective of its purpose, driving factors, and outcome: why we collaborate, how we undertake it, and what goals are pursued through our joint efforts. It begins by analyzing factors that contributed to the evolutionary success of our species—pressures that shaped us to collaborate intuitively and inherently. It explores how collaboration is linked to the challenges of managing common pool resources and distinguishes between utilitarian from vicarious forms. It stresses the limitations of economic models, which overly emphasize rational self-interest, and argues to replace the reductionism prevalent in economic theories with a nonlinear approach. Approaching future research this way will enable a more nuanced, comprehensive understanding of collaboration—one that transcends simple transactional relationships and incorporates a deeper, more integrated view of human behavior and interaction.

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This chapter summarizes observations, insights, and ideas that arose during a series of discussions aimed at understanding how people collaborate. Three primary characteristics of collaboration emerged: its multidimensionality, sensitivity to context, and dynamism. They are discussed within a general conceptual framework, and historical and present-day examples are provided. First, collaborations of any size build upon and are scaffolded by a complex set of coordinates, constraints, rules, and behavioral regulations that distribute activities, authorities, and structure the social and material environment to support the collaboration. These choices, which make up the collaborative architecture, can be explicitly designed or evolve spontaneously during the collaboration. Second, collaborations need to adapt constantly to changing demands and circumstances across multiple timescales. Successful collaborative architectures tend to be highly task- and context-dependent, and mindful of the diversity of participants, local culture, and the extent of goal alignment and trust. Third, collaborations are dynamic processes; their design changes over time with limits imposed by environmental, material, and cultural structures. Collaborations should thus be viewed as complex adaptive systems that develop over time, contingent on the demands of changing circumstances and internal/external feedback—a perspective that resists reductionist analysis. Collaborations can be messy and unpredictable as well as incredibly resilient and persistent. Thus, the study of collaboration must be approached with humility and prudence.

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Humans may be “super-cooperators,” but no collaboration lasts forever. This chapter summarizes the outcome of an interdisciplinary collaboration between political, social, economic, and cognitive scientists into the question of collaboration collapse. It locates the breakdown of collaboration downstream from the failure to align on either values or actions. A fourfold taxonomy is presented of the consequence of these failures: catastrophic collapse, generative reboot, contested persistence, and sputter on launch. Each failure mode is illustrated by case studies (e.g., the breakup of the Beatles, the collapse of the Hawai‘ian kapu system, the failure of the Kyoto Protocol, kinship taxation, resistance to antibiotics) to demonstrate how general principles of our taxonomy unfold over a range of historical, political, and economic contexts. Understanding the mechanisms that underpin successful collaborations and the taxonomies of dysfunction might inform efforts in pursuit of stable collaboration and enable interventions that do not disrupt or enfeeble alignment mechanisms.

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To gain insight into how collaboration breaks down, we asked each participant in the podcast interviews to describe specific situations where collaboration is disrupted and factors that may have contributed to this outcome. As in the other podcast chapters (Chapters 6, 10, and 15, this volume), the context in which a collaboration was embedded was cited as fundamental.

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This project has examined the nature and dynamics of collaboration, asking what it is, how it is realized, and what its underlying processes are. The tentative answers to these questions form a broad and partially contradictory panoply of positions expressing various levels of optimism about humans’ capability to collaborate. To enable more definitive answers, we need to advance our understanding and practice of collaboration. Here, I outline such an endeavor, starting with reflections on the high-level questions of what collaboration is and how we can know its underlying principles. Thereafter, I sketch out some of the profound questions that need to be addressed with respect to the human substrate of collaboration and its organization and a collection of outstanding questions that emerged from this project. Humanity’s global challenges require global collaboration, and I hope we will live up to our collective responsibility to tackle these issues, starting with placing our understanding and practice of collaboration on a solid transdisciplinary scientific foundation.

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