11 ms·

Hierarchy Is Detrimental for Human Cooperation

208 points by rfreytag 11y ago

mozumder 11y ago
Can explain why Republicans are less empathetic towards their fellow citizens, as they tend to be more about libertarian self empowerment, where they are kings of their own world. Example: If you have a gun, you are placing yourself above others in order to gain power over them, and are therefore less likely to cooperate with your fellow citizens by offering to pay for their health care through taxes.
- mordae 11y ago
  That's not what is says. It says that if you place yourself above the others, you will need to contribute more. Probably because others will be reluctant to do so out fear of you grabbing most of the earnings. It might mean that you need unions for people to feel that they are getting their fair share, making them more invested.
  - dawnbreez 11y ago
    I'd be afraid to get a union involved, because in my experience they make terrible decisions (reducing "full time" from 40 hours to 32, making it near-impossible to fire troublemaker workers, allowing each worker to be used for work they're not actually trained for with no prior warning). Then again, the only unionized place I've worked in is a Kroger.
- jrochkind1 11y ago
  No, I don't think that hypothesis has anything to do with the study at all. Just for starters, cooperative behavior declined in the lower ranked individuals in the study. From the abstract: "cooperation declined in the presence of a hierarchy due to a decrease in investment by lower ranked individuals." I admit I have only read the abstract so far. Did you even read that?
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  I'd love to see a study of the relative effects of hierarchy and cooperation in problem-solving effectiveness and inventiveness, with some interest in what positive non-toxic hierarchy looks like. The right kind of leadership really does seem to make everyone more focused and effective. But there are so many wrong kinds of leadership that the best outcome happen very rarely; bad leadership seems to be immensely destructive of group ability, and is much worse than ad hoc cooperation with no formal leadership.
  - js8 11y ago
    It seems to me that FOSS projects like Linux have a "positive non-toxic" hierarchy. The hierarchy there is only based on merit and imposes no power constraints over the members, who all have the same access to the source. If you disagree with the elders, you can fork. I think if your project or team needs hierarchy for the decision-making, then the hierarchical order should have no power (for example, the leaders could be voted in democratically), because that way you get the positive effects and avoid the negative effects.
- skaevola 11y ago
  "Republicans are less empathetic towards their fellow citizens" Seriously? It's well established that conservatives/republicans donate more to charity. Here's Nicholas Kristoff's column on it: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/opinion/21kristof.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/opinion/21kristof.html?_r=... Not only do Republicans donate more in absolute terms to charity, they also have lower average incomes, which means that the average giving as a portion of income is much higher. And it's not just donations to their church, Republicans are even more likely to donate blood than Democrats! I'm not writing this because I want to claim the moral high ground for the Republicans, I see Republicans and Democrats as each having different takes on how best to help the poor. Neither side has a monopoly on empathy.
  - andyjohnson0 11y ago
    "they also have lower average incomes, which means that the average giving as a portion of income is much higher" I'd be cautious about comparing the average of one distribution with the average of another. Unless you know how the quantities are distributed (and income in particular is unlikely to be normally distributed), you risk making some misleading conclusions.
  - mozumder 11y ago
    > It's well established that conservatives/republicans donate more to charity. Liberals solve social problems through taxes and big government, instead of donations. Neither side may have a monopoly, but one side is far more effective than the other at solving social problems.
    - jerf 11y ago
      I honestly don't even know which side it is that you think is "far more effective" at solving social problems. Do you think it's the Democrats? Because "big government and taxes" are also far more effective at creating social problems that local charities. Have you read about the corrosive effects of welfare on black communities? Have you ever joined in complaining about the inability of public school systems to successfully adapt and harness changing technologies? Have you noticed that our biggest social problems just "happen" to also be located right where Democratic policies were enacted (i.e., the policies preceded the social degradation)? All of these things are certainly at least debatable, but they are also certainly not so obviously false that they can simply be discarded without consideration. "Big government and taxes" may theoretically be more capable of solving problems, but there's a big gulf between theory and reality. And back on point so this is at least less an off-topic diversion than it otherwise would be, are you A: inclined to agree that hierarchies are bad for cooperation even as B: you declare that the largest hierarchy in the world, "government", is better at solving social problems than distributed non-hierarchical networks? I don't know, because you, mozumder, personally didn't say, but I rather suspect there's a lot of people here holding both those beliefs simultaneously without noticing the profound philosophical conflicts they have.
dawnbreez 11y ago
Hierarchy may be bad for cooperation, but it is great for quick decision making. Further, I would argue that the decrease in "investment" shown in lower-level members of a team is not a symptom of hierarchy, but a symptom of bad leadership--the appoonted leader doesn't know how to lead, and the decision to make him leader seems unfair.
- InclinedPlane 11y ago
  It really isn't. It's great for quick bad decision making, but so is rolling a die. It takes so much time and effort for information to flow up and down the hierarchy that it takes a long time for informed decisions to get made, let alone good ones.
  - dawnbreez 11y ago
    That's where chain-of-command and executive decisions come into play. In an army field manual for tactics, it states that each level in the hierarchy of a chain of command should be responsible for a certain level of the battlefield; the Commander in Chief decides who to go to war against, the general decides which city is a priority, his liutenants decide how to assault the city, the sergeants decide which building to run to, and the private decides how to get to that building in a timely manner. Most businesses do not do this. They rely entirely on decisions from higher up, which are often uninformed about small-picture things, even if they understand the big picture.
    - kitsune_ 11y ago
      This doesn't alleviate the big problem with command hierarchies. If the top decision is wrong, and the commander in chief / CEO is ignorant to the advice of their subordinates, there usually is no other recourse than mutiny (war time) or resignation (businesses). This is played out at every level of the hierarchy.
      - michaelt 11y ago
        Which command structure is most appropriate will depend on the challenges the business is facing. If the business has solid fundamentals and basically needs to keep making incremental improvements and watch the money roll in, almost any management structure will do it. But if a business has needs exit a market with poor fundamentals, and that requires them to close factories, end product lines and fire people? The people getting fired won't be happy about that. So if your management structure requires their consent, you're going to have a bad time.
tbrownaw 11y ago
Hierarchy is defined as priority of access to resources and probability of winning competitive encounters ...and cooperation is some game that sounds like the lower-ranked participant will have a negative expected return (double a common pot -- as long as it's above threshold -- and let the higher-ranked person take more than half). . I'm thinking this won't apply very well to situations where everyone has a positive expected return. Like most real-world organizations, companies, etc.
- RobertoG 11y ago
  "I'm thinking this won't apply very well to situations where everyone has a positive expected return. Like most real-world organizations, companies, etc." Don't understand your point. In the experiment, the low ranked persons get a positive return. It's just that, the return, it's determined, not by the investment in the cooperation phase, but by the position in the hierarchy. How that doesn't apply?
  - tbrownaw 11y ago
    Because they get less than half of the doubled pot? ...re-reading, it sounds like the pot is actually set to double the threshold rather than doubling whatever's in it. Which means the way I was trying to calculate things out won't work, but also explains why the splitting phase behaved like it did.
- panglott 11y ago
  It does sound like that's about zero-sum games, but there can also be competition for the rewards of positive-sum games. If we collaborate to produce 100 pounds of bananas and you take 70 pounds and I take 30, that's evidence of a hierarchy even if I also come out ahead.
- nabla9 11y ago
  There are number of primate and human studies that suggest that we value perceived justice and fairness and just offering positive expected return is not enough. A Theory of Fairness, Competition, and Cooperation http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/114/3/817.short http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/114/3/817.short https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/726/1/Fehr-Schmidt_Handbook_2005-Munichecon.pdf https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/726/1/Fehr-Schmidt_Handbook_... Justice- and fairness-related behaviors in nonhuman primates http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3690609/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3690609/ Chimpanzees play the ultimatum game http://www.pnas.org/content/110/6/2070 http://www.pnas.org/content/110/6/2070
golemotron 11y ago
Undoing hierarchy at every turn is in the zeitgeist. We need to take some time to appreciate when it is useful. My belief is that it is useful for quick action and inevitable when human systems scale.
- k__ 11y ago
  The problem doesn't seem to be hierarchy, but that it's expected to climb it. Some people are good in management, some aren't. But if you're long enough in a job, you have to take on a management position to get paid more or to make decisions in your favor. Yes the payment thing isn't a big problem in the IT sector, senior engineers often get paid as much or even more than managers. But the decision part is still a problem. Often you end up with stupid ideas you have to execute and the only way to change them is to get rid of the manager, because he won't consider he failed...
  - deleted 11y ago
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  - laotzu 11y ago
    Success is as dangerous as failure. Hope is as hollow as fear. What does it mean that success is as dangerous as failure? Whether you go up the ladder or down it, your position is shaky. When you stand with your two feet on the ground, you will always keep your balance. -Lao Tzu
    - eggie 11y ago
      Lovely. Are you a Lao Tzu quote bot ;) ?
  - kabdib 11y ago
    Even in a flat organization, some people are good at organizing other folks and getting things done that way, while others are good at sitting down by themselves and cranking stuff out. I'd say the needle is much farther towards "communication and cooperation" (as opposed to "unopinionated worker drone") than in a hierarchy, but the spread of abilities is still there. The nice thing about being truly flat is that there's no boss to get rid of if they're not working out. You just decide not to work with them. [Flat isn't totally wonderful and there are still issues with it which I don't care to get into right now.]
sfg 11y ago
When I think of hierarchy - in the context of a shared task - I think of who gets to make decisions about how a task is done, but here it seems to be about who gets to decide how the bounty is split when the split happens after the task is complete and bounty already earned. So, testing hierarchy of post result bounty splitting rather than hierarchy of task co-ordination. What does this relate to in the world? How is it a test of a relevant type of hierarchy? Am I missing something (I would not be surprised, we all have mental blindspots)?
- RobertoG 11y ago
  Hierarchy in the natural world is decided by power. And power means that you can get the most, never mind what the others think. If a chimpanzee leave other to decide because the other is better in the task at hand and, then, they split the bounty, they have both the same hierarchy. If a chimpanzee leave other in the group to decide how to do the task and then keep everything for himself, he is in the top of the hierarchy and the other is just working for him. In the not so natural world too, by the way.
  - erikpukinskis 11y ago
    > power means that you can get the most, never mind what the others think. No, sometimes the bounty is having influence. You're not looking far enough up the hierarchy of needs: https://figures.boundless.com/29841/large/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs.png https://figures.boundless.com/29841/large/Maslow's_hierarchy...
codeismightier 11y ago
The experiment seems poorly designed if the purpose is to simulate the real world: "In the cooperation phase, both players ... contribute simultaneously ... to a common pot, unaware of the partner’s contribution." The higher-ranked player then gets priority in determining how the payoff is split. Who goes to work without agreeing on a salary?? Who co-founds a company without agreeing to an equity split?? The connotation for the so-called "lower ranked player" is also misleading, as in the real world the employer is more similar to their "lower ranked player": the employer usually commits to paying the employee around three months' worth of salary first. The employee then gets to choose to slack off or work hard. So, in a sense, the employee gets to choose how to divide the payoff: the employee always gets the salary, while the employer gets (output - salary). Of course, in the real world the game is then iterated, as the employer gets to choose to fire the employee or continue the relationship. Any experiment in game theory that doesn't involve iteration is highly unrealistic -- the fact that we have a reputation to keep and have to deal with each other over and over again is pretty darn important! Frankly I'm a little bit disappointed that Nature has chosen to publish this paper, as I don't see what insight it offers.
- RobertoG 11y ago
  "The experiment seems poorly designed if the purpose is to simulate the real world" The stated purpose is to try to reproduce the same experiments and behaviors that observed in other primates. Some insights I get: 1. In those conditions, our behavior is very similar to other primates. 2. The splitting phase is not influenced by the collaboration phase (I can't avoid to note that you don't choose to apply this insight to start ups). 3. There is some component that we don't understand that account for the difference with the Nash equilibrium. 4. When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail
  - codeismightier 11y ago
    >> 2. The splitting phase is not influenced by the collaboration phase (I can't avoid to note that you don't choose to apply this insight to start ups). Vesting is supposed to serve that purpose by allowing a co-founder who doesn't contribute to be fired. Certainly it can be harder to fire a non-performing co-founder though.
norea-armozel 11y ago
I wonder if they controlled for specific relationships like the participants never have met prior to the trials or anything of that sort. I can't find anything the article to indicate that.
hyperdunc 11y ago
I remember reading a study recently about the health aspects of power disparity. It concluded hierarchical social structures impose significant physical and mental health risks on those at the bottom. Unfortunately I can't find the source.
- RobertoG 11y ago
  An interesting observation related to this is posture. The posture that show higher status, straight back, looking to the front and not down, relaxed muscles, etc.. need less energy and is better for your health. Another interesting though is how good food makes you bigger an taller. So, however is low in the hierarchy, is always less strong and in worst shape, what makes them to get less food, and so on.. It's easy to see how a feedback of this kind begins. Of course, all this is carry on to the next generation by several dynamics. I try to remember all this when I hear how some communities are hopeless or just 'don't want to work'.
- sawwit 11y ago
  On the other hand, in my experience absolute equality can also result in stressful situations because of things like diffusion of responsibility and communication difficulties. Sometimes it's just more efficient to outsource decisions to decision makers rather than worryig about them yourself. I think the Goldilocks principle applies here.
- tdaltonc 11y ago
  You're probably thinking of the Whitehall Study[0]. There's a more recent study about how being the person at the top can be really stressful too[1]. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehall_Study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehall_Study [1] http://www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h6424 http://www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h6424
- ryankuykendall 11y ago
  Was it the Whitehall Study: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehall_Study https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehall_Study
galfarragem 11y ago
Hierarchy, not money, makes the world go round.
- erikpukinskis 11y ago
  Neither of those categorical statements are true. The world is a heterogenous overlaying of all possible political systems working simultaneously. There is capitalism (money), there is delegation (hierarchy), there is anarchism... often in the same room.
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laotzu 11y ago
Linear hierarchy may have been effective for quick decision making in the age of paper and print but as Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt point out in their book Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (1972)[1], in the age of electric media distributed networking and flat hierarchies become the most effective organizational form and "Johnny on the spot" is the one who makes the quickest and most accurate decision as opposed to the executive: McLuhan: Take today means that at the speed of light, today includes all the past that ever was, and all the future, it's here now. Nevitt: That is we can retrieve the past, we can be in touch with the present, and the future of the future is the present, so we are in touch with all times now, today. McLuhan: But let us notice that in a world of simultaneous information, you have basically an acoustic world, not a visual world with a point of view, not a positional world from which to look at the future or the past, but an acoustic world in which you are bombarded simultaneously by every kind of data from every direction ... the simultaneity of information means that you live in a world which is simultaneous in terms of its information structure. From every direction you have information electrically. Now this creates a new kind of space. Nevitt: Yes, it is a new kind of space for us and yet an old kind of space for humanity. McLuhan: Well, for pre-literate man. Nevitt: Yes. McLuhan: The space in which we live is identical to the space of pre-literate man, pre-visual man, it is acoustic space. Nevitt: Post-literate space and pre-literate space are similar. McLuhan: Yes but the question that seems not to have entered most minds is, what is the structure of acoustic space? In fact, most psychologists have never heard of acoustic space and they don't understand its properties. Its properties are those of a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose margin is nowhere. Nevitt: That is, no boundaries, and no single center, but centers everywhere. McLuhan: centers everywhere, margins nowhere. Nevitt: No points of view. ... McLuhan: The old structure was made up of fragmented specialist jobs. Nevitt: Exactly, and hierarchies of responsibility which were delegated from the top down and channels of communication which were supposed by the organization chart upon which they flow from top to bottom, and bottom to top. McLuhan: So the theme of our book is that you cannot use an organization chart with electric services added. Nevitt: So that "the executive is drop out" means three things, it means first of all: the man who finds himself as top executive in a large organization, gets out of touch with the action, that is, he gets so far out of touch with what's happening, that as a human being, he has no more satisfactions in the process. That’s the first thing it means. The second thing is that specialism as a means of coping with this acoustic space, doesn't work, that is it has dropped out, it is no longer effective. And the third thing is, that in a knowledge environment, that is where the information is everywhere, like acoustic space with centers everywhere and margins or boundaries are nowhere, then every man knows how to be an executive, and "johnny on the spot" is the man who really makes the decision. McLuhan: Oh, the hijacker is a nice case of a man who wants to be an executive and wants to take over an operation but he also wants coverage, he wants part of that global theatre for himself, he wants to be in the center of the show. Nevitt: And the global theater itself becomes possible, and the hijacker becomes possible only in a world which is such that you are on camera. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTyzjC_s-kk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTyzjC_s-kk
evv555 11y ago
The issue I have with these kinds of narratives is they conflate structural and social/power hierarchies. People have spent alot of time rallying against the former thinking it's the latter. The two often correlate in the case of human organizations but are not equivalent. Structural hierarchy also seems to be an intractable problem. It's smarter to construct hierarchies that are more inclusive then to be categorically against the idea.
rubidium 11y ago
"Given a longer sequence of repeated interactions, it might be possible that members of a hierarchically organized group would partially overcome mistrust of higher ranked individuals in those that establish generous reputations and these individuals might be able to elicit more contributions from their lower ranked partners. " To be clear about the implications of this study: Society = longer sequence of repeated interactions. This study is not relevant to thinking about organizing society. It acknowledges it has zero relevance to whether hierarchy is good or bad for human society.
- davidovitch 11y ago
  Exactly, the paper also expresses hopes that people continue to study of human social interaction: >> Moving forward, experiments in artificial social contexts like ours appear to be a very powerful tool to examine strategic behavior in socially relevant situations. We hope that our work will stimulate further work along these lines. It is clear it will be nearly impossible to account for all the factors in one controlled experiment. Note that such "total experiments" in the other scientific fields is challenging as well. Usually one first tries to understand certain fundamental processes, then they move on to the interactions between them.
- mizzao 11y ago
  My research group is currently writing up the results for a study where we experimentally studied cooperation that took place over an entire month. We found the very interesting result that cooperation was basically maintained at a high level instead of declining over the course of a 1-hour lab session, as predicted by much previous work. On a related point, this experiment is a little worrisome because each player only had "9 rounds" to interact with others due to the concern of extended reputation effects. In my experience running this type of experiment, that is not even enough to understand the rules within which people play. (In our case, we had people play 400 ten-round games, 4000 rounds total, and a steady state was reached after about 60-80 games.) While not completely an "organized society", it does address the generalization limitations of behavioral labs in one important way: the time and span of participation. As you mentioned, this is one fundamental respect where society differs from experiments.
tdaltonc 11y ago
This is an odd paper. It reads like a so-so experimental game theory paper written by an anthropologist. The task was designed to produce Nash equilibria that would fit story they wanted to tell. And they as though they are surprised to see "the behavior of the two partners is only qualitatively similar to" the behavior the game was designed to elicit. I think that the most interesting finding is buried halfway down. "Another interesting observation is that for greater rank differences (lower k), the higher ranked individuals are prone to share an amount larger than the Nash prediction." This means that the player in the dominate position behaved more fairly then they needed to. Given that finding I think this would be a better titile: "Hierarchy is Not as Detrimental for Human Cooperation as You Might Expect"
- rewqfdsa 11y ago
  > The task was designed to produce Nash equilibria that would fit story they wanted to tell. Unfortunately, this kind of malarkey is common in the social sciences today. In fact, more than half of the results are non-reproducible[1][2]. Whether published in Nature or a lesser journal, the current research climate forces me to treat social science results as noise, especially when the results happen to fit one of the major ideologies currently vying for political domination. Sure, this heuristic is unfair to well-designed, dispassionate studies, but since I'm not qualified to evaluate the merits of each study, I have to make conservative assumptions. [1] http://www.socialmatter.net/2015/09/18/whats-to-be-done-about-the-reproducibility-crisis-in-the-social-sciences/ http://www.socialmatter.net/2015/09/18/whats-to-be-done-abou... [2] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-replicated-100-psychology-studies-and-fewer-half-got-same-results-180956426/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-repl...
  - noobermin 11y ago
    >Whether published in Nature or a lesser journal That's upsetting. Nature is usually quite the stamp of approval. I have some acquaintances who have critical views of Nature, but they dare doubt the rigor of their publications.
- zenogais 11y ago
davidovitch 11y ago
Ultimately, what this paper means to me is that there is evidence (based on simplified conditions, granted) that people collaborate better when they believe they will receive a fair share of the outcome. This makes a lot of sense to me, especially when comparing to real life. For example, why is it that in many cases it is the small startup that creates innovative new technologies compared to large and well funded established players? I guess there are many factors at play, but I would argue that at least one factor relates to a more successful collaboration within the smaller environment, which in part is sourced upon the fact that there is promise of a higher payout in the case of success (equity as part of the salary).
- deleted 11y ago
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- HelloMcFly 11y ago
  > that people collaborate better when they believe they will receive a fair share of the outcome. There's research demonstrating that group effort and outcomes are detrimentally impacted by increased pay dispersion among the group members. Pay dispersion could form an "informal hierarchy", I suppose.
sjg007 11y ago
If you exploit people without giving them a fair share then they will eventually revolt.
MarlonPro 11y ago
Did Tony Hsieh commission this study? I'm just wondering ;-) jk
MarlonPro 11y ago
Did Tony Hsieh commission this study? I'm just wondering ;-) jk
dkural 11y ago
I believe hierarchy is not detrimental at all (indeed, it is a pre-requisite) for cooperation. Humanity spent the vast majority of its history in loose bands of tribes with no clear inter-tribal hierarchy. Thus we spent thousands of years murdering each other on contact. You may think you are "peers" in the US / West etc, but in fact you are peers in that you've accepted an overarching higher authority in the form of the government - in particular, it's ability to enforce laws by coercion and violence. Thus instead of wondering if the other guy is about to bash your skull, we coexist in relative peace. International relations, however, lack clear hierarchy - it is a semi-structured anarchy of might-makes-right. Thus we fail to cooperate on many "tragedy of the commons" type problems, such as climate change. Chronic warfare is a defining feature of the 20th century due to this lack of hierarchy. At the micro level, try running a startup with no hierarchy. You'll find that this will fester conflict, as engineers endlessly argue with no mechanism to bring decisions efficiently and move forward. Indeed, hierarchy is emergent, and tolerated for its virtues by humans because when it does not emerge, the "company" of people dissipate and fail their mission.
- golemotron 11y ago
  I believe this is true too. Hierarchy is a pre-requisite for cooperation. The most productive OSS projects all seem to have benevolent dictators, don't they?

208 points by rfreytag 11y ago

Can explain why Republicans are less empathetic towards their fellow citizens, as they tend to be more about libertarian self empowerment, where they are kings of their own world. Example: If you have a gun, you are placing yourself above others in order to gain power over them, and are therefore less likely to cooperate with your fellow citizens by offering to pay for their health care through taxes.

mordae 11y ago
That's not what is says. It says that if you place yourself above the others, you will need to contribute more. Probably because others will be reluctant to do so out fear of you grabbing most of the earnings. It might mean that you need unions for people to feel that they are getting their fair share, making them more invested.
- dawnbreez 11y ago
  I'd be afraid to get a union involved, because in my experience they make terrible decisions (reducing "full time" from 40 hours to 32, making it near-impossible to fire troublemaker workers, allowing each worker to be used for work they're not actually trained for with no prior warning). Then again, the only unionized place I've worked in is a Kroger.
jrochkind1 11y ago
No, I don't think that hypothesis has anything to do with the study at all. Just for starters, cooperative behavior declined in the lower ranked individuals in the study. From the abstract: "cooperation declined in the presence of a hierarchy due to a decrease in investment by lower ranked individuals." I admit I have only read the abstract so far. Did you even read that?
TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
I'd love to see a study of the relative effects of hierarchy and cooperation in problem-solving effectiveness and inventiveness, with some interest in what positive non-toxic hierarchy looks like. The right kind of leadership really does seem to make everyone more focused and effective. But there are so many wrong kinds of leadership that the best outcome happen very rarely; bad leadership seems to be immensely destructive of group ability, and is much worse than ad hoc cooperation with no formal leadership.
- js8 11y ago
  It seems to me that FOSS projects like Linux have a "positive non-toxic" hierarchy. The hierarchy there is only based on merit and imposes no power constraints over the members, who all have the same access to the source. If you disagree with the elders, you can fork. I think if your project or team needs hierarchy for the decision-making, then the hierarchical order should have no power (for example, the leaders could be voted in democratically), because that way you get the positive effects and avoid the negative effects.
skaevola 11y ago
"Republicans are less empathetic towards their fellow citizens" Seriously? It's well established that conservatives/republicans donate more to charity. Here's Nicholas Kristoff's column on it: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/opinion/21kristof.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/opinion/21kristof.html?_r=... Not only do Republicans donate more in absolute terms to charity, they also have lower average incomes, which means that the average giving as a portion of income is much higher. And it's not just donations to their church, Republicans are even more likely to donate blood than Democrats! I'm not writing this because I want to claim the moral high ground for the Republicans, I see Republicans and Democrats as each having different takes on how best to help the poor. Neither side has a monopoly on empathy.
- andyjohnson0 11y ago
  "they also have lower average incomes, which means that the average giving as a portion of income is much higher" I'd be cautious about comparing the average of one distribution with the average of another. Unless you know how the quantities are distributed (and income in particular is unlikely to be normally distributed), you risk making some misleading conclusions.
- mozumder 11y ago
  > It's well established that conservatives/republicans donate more to charity. Liberals solve social problems through taxes and big government, instead of donations. Neither side may have a monopoly, but one side is far more effective than the other at solving social problems.
  - jerf 11y ago
    I honestly don't even know which side it is that you think is "far more effective" at solving social problems. Do you think it's the Democrats? Because "big government and taxes" are also far more effective at creating social problems that local charities. Have you read about the corrosive effects of welfare on black communities? Have you ever joined in complaining about the inability of public school systems to successfully adapt and harness changing technologies? Have you noticed that our biggest social problems just "happen" to also be located right where Democratic policies were enacted (i.e., the policies preceded the social degradation)? All of these things are certainly at least debatable, but they are also certainly not so obviously false that they can simply be discarded without consideration. "Big government and taxes" may theoretically be more capable of solving problems, but there's a big gulf between theory and reality. And back on point so this is at least less an off-topic diversion than it otherwise would be, are you A: inclined to agree that hierarchies are bad for cooperation even as B: you declare that the largest hierarchy in the world, "government", is better at solving social problems than distributed non-hierarchical networks? I don't know, because you, mozumder, personally didn't say, but I rather suspect there's a lot of people here holding both those beliefs simultaneously without noticing the profound philosophical conflicts they have.

dawnbreez 11y ago

Hierarchy may be bad for cooperation, but it is great for quick decision making. Further, I would argue that the decrease in "investment" shown in lower-level members of a team is not a symptom of hierarchy, but a symptom of bad leadership--the appoonted leader doesn't know how to lead, and the decision to make him leader seems unfair.

InclinedPlane 11y ago
It really isn't. It's great for quick bad decision making, but so is rolling a die. It takes so much time and effort for information to flow up and down the hierarchy that it takes a long time for informed decisions to get made, let alone good ones.
- dawnbreez 11y ago
  That's where chain-of-command and executive decisions come into play. In an army field manual for tactics, it states that each level in the hierarchy of a chain of command should be responsible for a certain level of the battlefield; the Commander in Chief decides who to go to war against, the general decides which city is a priority, his liutenants decide how to assault the city, the sergeants decide which building to run to, and the private decides how to get to that building in a timely manner. Most businesses do not do this. They rely entirely on decisions from higher up, which are often uninformed about small-picture things, even if they understand the big picture.
  - kitsune_ 11y ago
    This doesn't alleviate the big problem with command hierarchies. If the top decision is wrong, and the commander in chief / CEO is ignorant to the advice of their subordinates, there usually is no other recourse than mutiny (war time) or resignation (businesses). This is played out at every level of the hierarchy.
    - michaelt 11y ago
      Which command structure is most appropriate will depend on the challenges the business is facing. If the business has solid fundamentals and basically needs to keep making incremental improvements and watch the money roll in, almost any management structure will do it. But if a business has needs exit a market with poor fundamentals, and that requires them to close factories, end product lines and fire people? The people getting fired won't be happy about that. So if your management structure requires their consent, you're going to have a bad time.

tbrownaw 11y ago

Hierarchy is defined as priority of access to resources and probability of winning competitive encounters ...and cooperation is some game that sounds like the lower-ranked participant will have a negative expected return (double a common pot -- as long as it's above threshold -- and let the higher-ranked person take more than half). . I'm thinking this won't apply very well to situations where everyone has a positive expected return. Like most real-world organizations, companies, etc.

RobertoG 11y ago
"I'm thinking this won't apply very well to situations where everyone has a positive expected return. Like most real-world organizations, companies, etc." Don't understand your point. In the experiment, the low ranked persons get a positive return. It's just that, the return, it's determined, not by the investment in the cooperation phase, but by the position in the hierarchy. How that doesn't apply?
- tbrownaw 11y ago
  Because they get less than half of the doubled pot? ...re-reading, it sounds like the pot is actually set to double the threshold rather than doubling whatever's in it. Which means the way I was trying to calculate things out won't work, but also explains why the splitting phase behaved like it did.
panglott 11y ago
It does sound like that's about zero-sum games, but there can also be competition for the rewards of positive-sum games. If we collaborate to produce 100 pounds of bananas and you take 70 pounds and I take 30, that's evidence of a hierarchy even if I also come out ahead.
nabla9 11y ago
There are number of primate and human studies that suggest that we value perceived justice and fairness and just offering positive expected return is not enough. A Theory of Fairness, Competition, and Cooperation http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/114/3/817.short http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/114/3/817.short https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/726/1/Fehr-Schmidt_Handbook_2005-Munichecon.pdf https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/726/1/Fehr-Schmidt_Handbook_... Justice- and fairness-related behaviors in nonhuman primates http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3690609/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3690609/ Chimpanzees play the ultimatum game http://www.pnas.org/content/110/6/2070 http://www.pnas.org/content/110/6/2070

golemotron 11y ago

Undoing hierarchy at every turn is in the zeitgeist. We need to take some time to appreciate when it is useful. My belief is that it is useful for quick action and inevitable when human systems scale.

k__ 11y ago
The problem doesn't seem to be hierarchy, but that it's expected to climb it. Some people are good in management, some aren't. But if you're long enough in a job, you have to take on a management position to get paid more or to make decisions in your favor. Yes the payment thing isn't a big problem in the IT sector, senior engineers often get paid as much or even more than managers. But the decision part is still a problem. Often you end up with stupid ideas you have to execute and the only way to change them is to get rid of the manager, because he won't consider he failed...
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- laotzu 11y ago
  Success is as dangerous as failure. Hope is as hollow as fear. What does it mean that success is as dangerous as failure? Whether you go up the ladder or down it, your position is shaky. When you stand with your two feet on the ground, you will always keep your balance. -Lao Tzu
  - eggie 11y ago
    Lovely. Are you a Lao Tzu quote bot ;) ?
- kabdib 11y ago
  Even in a flat organization, some people are good at organizing other folks and getting things done that way, while others are good at sitting down by themselves and cranking stuff out. I'd say the needle is much farther towards "communication and cooperation" (as opposed to "unopinionated worker drone") than in a hierarchy, but the spread of abilities is still there. The nice thing about being truly flat is that there's no boss to get rid of if they're not working out. You just decide not to work with them. [Flat isn't totally wonderful and there are still issues with it which I don't care to get into right now.]

sfg 11y ago

When I think of hierarchy - in the context of a shared task - I think of who gets to make decisions about how a task is done, but here it seems to be about who gets to decide how the bounty is split when the split happens after the task is complete and bounty already earned. So, testing hierarchy of post result bounty splitting rather than hierarchy of task co-ordination. What does this relate to in the world? How is it a test of a relevant type of hierarchy? Am I missing something (I would not be surprised, we all have mental blindspots)?

RobertoG 11y ago
Hierarchy in the natural world is decided by power. And power means that you can get the most, never mind what the others think. If a chimpanzee leave other to decide because the other is better in the task at hand and, then, they split the bounty, they have both the same hierarchy. If a chimpanzee leave other in the group to decide how to do the task and then keep everything for himself, he is in the top of the hierarchy and the other is just working for him. In the not so natural world too, by the way.
- erikpukinskis 11y ago
  > power means that you can get the most, never mind what the others think. No, sometimes the bounty is having influence. You're not looking far enough up the hierarchy of needs: https://figures.boundless.com/29841/large/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs.png https://figures.boundless.com/29841/large/Maslow's_hierarchy...

codeismightier 11y ago

The experiment seems poorly designed if the purpose is to simulate the real world: "In the cooperation phase, both players ... contribute simultaneously ... to a common pot, unaware of the partner’s contribution." The higher-ranked player then gets priority in determining how the payoff is split. Who goes to work without agreeing on a salary?? Who co-founds a company without agreeing to an equity split?? The connotation for the so-called "lower ranked player" is also misleading, as in the real world the employer is more similar to their "lower ranked player": the employer usually commits to paying the employee around three months' worth of salary first. The employee then gets to choose to slack off or work hard. So, in a sense, the employee gets to choose how to divide the payoff: the employee always gets the salary, while the employer gets (output - salary). Of course, in the real world the game is then iterated, as the employer gets to choose to fire the employee or continue the relationship. Any experiment in game theory that doesn't involve iteration is highly unrealistic -- the fact that we have a reputation to keep and have to deal with each other over and over again is pretty darn important! Frankly I'm a little bit disappointed that Nature has chosen to publish this paper, as I don't see what insight it offers.

RobertoG 11y ago
"The experiment seems poorly designed if the purpose is to simulate the real world" The stated purpose is to try to reproduce the same experiments and behaviors that observed in other primates. Some insights I get: 1. In those conditions, our behavior is very similar to other primates. 2. The splitting phase is not influenced by the collaboration phase (I can't avoid to note that you don't choose to apply this insight to start ups). 3. There is some component that we don't understand that account for the difference with the Nash equilibrium. 4. When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail
- codeismightier 11y ago
  >> 2. The splitting phase is not influenced by the collaboration phase (I can't avoid to note that you don't choose to apply this insight to start ups). Vesting is supposed to serve that purpose by allowing a co-founder who doesn't contribute to be fired. Certainly it can be harder to fire a non-performing co-founder though.

norea-armozel 11y ago

I wonder if they controlled for specific relationships like the participants never have met prior to the trials or anything of that sort. I can't find anything the article to indicate that.

hyperdunc 11y ago

I remember reading a study recently about the health aspects of power disparity. It concluded hierarchical social structures impose significant physical and mental health risks on those at the bottom. Unfortunately I can't find the source.

RobertoG 11y ago
An interesting observation related to this is posture. The posture that show higher status, straight back, looking to the front and not down, relaxed muscles, etc.. need less energy and is better for your health. Another interesting though is how good food makes you bigger an taller. So, however is low in the hierarchy, is always less strong and in worst shape, what makes them to get less food, and so on.. It's easy to see how a feedback of this kind begins. Of course, all this is carry on to the next generation by several dynamics. I try to remember all this when I hear how some communities are hopeless or just 'don't want to work'.
sawwit 11y ago
On the other hand, in my experience absolute equality can also result in stressful situations because of things like diffusion of responsibility and communication difficulties. Sometimes it's just more efficient to outsource decisions to decision makers rather than worryig about them yourself. I think the Goldilocks principle applies here.
tdaltonc 11y ago
You're probably thinking of the Whitehall Study[0]. There's a more recent study about how being the person at the top can be really stressful too[1]. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehall_Study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehall_Study [1] http://www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h6424 http://www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h6424
ryankuykendall 11y ago
Was it the Whitehall Study: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehall_Study https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehall_Study

galfarragem 11y ago

Hierarchy, not money, makes the world go round.

erikpukinskis 11y ago
Neither of those categorical statements are true. The world is a heterogenous overlaying of all possible political systems working simultaneously. There is capitalism (money), there is delegation (hierarchy), there is anarchism... often in the same room.
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laotzu 11y ago

Linear hierarchy may have been effective for quick decision making in the age of paper and print but as Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt point out in their book Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (1972)[1], in the age of electric media distributed networking and flat hierarchies become the most effective organizational form and "Johnny on the spot" is the one who makes the quickest and most accurate decision as opposed to the executive: McLuhan: Take today means that at the speed of light, today includes all the past that ever was, and all the future, it's here now. Nevitt: That is we can retrieve the past, we can be in touch with the present, and the future of the future is the present, so we are in touch with all times now, today. McLuhan: But let us notice that in a world of simultaneous information, you have basically an acoustic world, not a visual world with a point of view, not a positional world from which to look at the future or the past, but an acoustic world in which you are bombarded simultaneously by every kind of data from every direction ... the simultaneity of information means that you live in a world which is simultaneous in terms of its information structure. From every direction you have information electrically. Now this creates a new kind of space. Nevitt: Yes, it is a new kind of space for us and yet an old kind of space for humanity. McLuhan: Well, for pre-literate man. Nevitt: Yes. McLuhan: The space in which we live is identical to the space of pre-literate man, pre-visual man, it is acoustic space. Nevitt: Post-literate space and pre-literate space are similar. McLuhan: Yes but the question that seems not to have entered most minds is, what is the structure of acoustic space? In fact, most psychologists have never heard of acoustic space and they don't understand its properties. Its properties are those of a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose margin is nowhere. Nevitt: That is, no boundaries, and no single center, but centers everywhere. McLuhan: centers everywhere, margins nowhere. Nevitt: No points of view. ... McLuhan: The old structure was made up of fragmented specialist jobs. Nevitt: Exactly, and hierarchies of responsibility which were delegated from the top down and channels of communication which were supposed by the organization chart upon which they flow from top to bottom, and bottom to top. McLuhan: So the theme of our book is that you cannot use an organization chart with electric services added. Nevitt: So that "the executive is drop out" means three things, it means first of all: the man who finds himself as top executive in a large organization, gets out of touch with the action, that is, he gets so far out of touch with what's happening, that as a human being, he has no more satisfactions in the process. That’s the first thing it means. The second thing is that specialism as a means of coping with this acoustic space, doesn't work, that is it has dropped out, it is no longer effective. And the third thing is, that in a knowledge environment, that is where the information is everywhere, like acoustic space with centers everywhere and margins or boundaries are nowhere, then every man knows how to be an executive, and "johnny on the spot" is the man who really makes the decision. McLuhan: Oh, the hijacker is a nice case of a man who wants to be an executive and wants to take over an operation but he also wants coverage, he wants part of that global theatre for himself, he wants to be in the center of the show. Nevitt: And the global theater itself becomes possible, and the hijacker becomes possible only in a world which is such that you are on camera. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTyzjC_s-kk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTyzjC_s-kk

evv555 11y ago

The issue I have with these kinds of narratives is they conflate structural and social/power hierarchies. People have spent alot of time rallying against the former thinking it's the latter. The two often correlate in the case of human organizations but are not equivalent. Structural hierarchy also seems to be an intractable problem. It's smarter to construct hierarchies that are more inclusive then to be categorically against the idea.

rubidium 11y ago

"Given a longer sequence of repeated interactions, it might be possible that members of a hierarchically organized group would partially overcome mistrust of higher ranked individuals in those that establish generous reputations and these individuals might be able to elicit more contributions from their lower ranked partners. " To be clear about the implications of this study: Society = longer sequence of repeated interactions. This study is not relevant to thinking about organizing society. It acknowledges it has zero relevance to whether hierarchy is good or bad for human society.

davidovitch 11y ago
Exactly, the paper also expresses hopes that people continue to study of human social interaction: >> Moving forward, experiments in artificial social contexts like ours appear to be a very powerful tool to examine strategic behavior in socially relevant situations. We hope that our work will stimulate further work along these lines. It is clear it will be nearly impossible to account for all the factors in one controlled experiment. Note that such "total experiments" in the other scientific fields is challenging as well. Usually one first tries to understand certain fundamental processes, then they move on to the interactions between them.
mizzao 11y ago
My research group is currently writing up the results for a study where we experimentally studied cooperation that took place over an entire month. We found the very interesting result that cooperation was basically maintained at a high level instead of declining over the course of a 1-hour lab session, as predicted by much previous work. On a related point, this experiment is a little worrisome because each player only had "9 rounds" to interact with others due to the concern of extended reputation effects. In my experience running this type of experiment, that is not even enough to understand the rules within which people play. (In our case, we had people play 400 ten-round games, 4000 rounds total, and a steady state was reached after about 60-80 games.) While not completely an "organized society", it does address the generalization limitations of behavioral labs in one important way: the time and span of participation. As you mentioned, this is one fundamental respect where society differs from experiments.

tdaltonc 11y ago

This is an odd paper. It reads like a so-so experimental game theory paper written by an anthropologist. The task was designed to produce Nash equilibria that would fit story they wanted to tell. And they as though they are surprised to see "the behavior of the two partners is only qualitatively similar to" the behavior the game was designed to elicit. I think that the most interesting finding is buried halfway down. "Another interesting observation is that for greater rank differences (lower k), the higher ranked individuals are prone to share an amount larger than the Nash prediction." This means that the player in the dominate position behaved more fairly then they needed to. Given that finding I think this would be a better titile: "Hierarchy is Not as Detrimental for Human Cooperation as You Might Expect"

rewqfdsa 11y ago
> The task was designed to produce Nash equilibria that would fit story they wanted to tell. Unfortunately, this kind of malarkey is common in the social sciences today. In fact, more than half of the results are non-reproducible[1][2]. Whether published in Nature or a lesser journal, the current research climate forces me to treat social science results as noise, especially when the results happen to fit one of the major ideologies currently vying for political domination. Sure, this heuristic is unfair to well-designed, dispassionate studies, but since I'm not qualified to evaluate the merits of each study, I have to make conservative assumptions. [1] http://www.socialmatter.net/2015/09/18/whats-to-be-done-about-the-reproducibility-crisis-in-the-social-sciences/ http://www.socialmatter.net/2015/09/18/whats-to-be-done-abou... [2] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-replicated-100-psychology-studies-and-fewer-half-got-same-results-180956426/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-repl...
- noobermin 11y ago
  >Whether published in Nature or a lesser journal That's upsetting. Nature is usually quite the stamp of approval. I have some acquaintances who have critical views of Nature, but they dare doubt the rigor of their publications.
zenogais 11y ago

davidovitch 11y ago

Ultimately, what this paper means to me is that there is evidence (based on simplified conditions, granted) that people collaborate better when they believe they will receive a fair share of the outcome. This makes a lot of sense to me, especially when comparing to real life. For example, why is it that in many cases it is the small startup that creates innovative new technologies compared to large and well funded established players? I guess there are many factors at play, but I would argue that at least one factor relates to a more successful collaboration within the smaller environment, which in part is sourced upon the fact that there is promise of a higher payout in the case of success (equity as part of the salary).

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HelloMcFly 11y ago
> that people collaborate better when they believe they will receive a fair share of the outcome. There's research demonstrating that group effort and outcomes are detrimentally impacted by increased pay dispersion among the group members. Pay dispersion could form an "informal hierarchy", I suppose.

sjg007 11y ago

If you exploit people without giving them a fair share then they will eventually revolt.

MarlonPro 11y ago

Did Tony Hsieh commission this study? I'm just wondering ;-) jk

MarlonPro 11y ago

Did Tony Hsieh commission this study? I'm just wondering ;-) jk

dkural 11y ago

I believe hierarchy is not detrimental at all (indeed, it is a pre-requisite) for cooperation. Humanity spent the vast majority of its history in loose bands of tribes with no clear inter-tribal hierarchy. Thus we spent thousands of years murdering each other on contact. You may think you are "peers" in the US / West etc, but in fact you are peers in that you've accepted an overarching higher authority in the form of the government - in particular, it's ability to enforce laws by coercion and violence. Thus instead of wondering if the other guy is about to bash your skull, we coexist in relative peace. International relations, however, lack clear hierarchy - it is a semi-structured anarchy of might-makes-right. Thus we fail to cooperate on many "tragedy of the commons" type problems, such as climate change. Chronic warfare is a defining feature of the 20th century due to this lack of hierarchy. At the micro level, try running a startup with no hierarchy. You'll find that this will fester conflict, as engineers endlessly argue with no mechanism to bring decisions efficiently and move forward. Indeed, hierarchy is emergent, and tolerated for its virtues by humans because when it does not emerge, the "company" of people dissipate and fail their mission.

golemotron 11y ago
I believe this is true too. Hierarchy is a pre-requisite for cooperation. The most productive OSS projects all seem to have benevolent dictators, don't they?