Hands clapping, feet tapping. It didn’t matter if it was a rhythmic movement or a sound; as long as the rhythm was coordinated as a group. Arizona State University psychology professor Athena Aktipis rewarded students taking her course with candy if they demonstrated a coordinated group effort. Students could also leave their small group and join a new one if they did not feel their group was cooperating. 

Of course, games engage college students, but the simulation points to real world importance. “We take for granted that people should just cooperate,” said Aktipis. “If people understood the structure of the problems they are trying to solve, everyone would be able to benefit more.” 

Cooperation becomes a matter of flourishing or floundering when it comes to sharing risk. For example, wildfires in California have put the insurance industry under extreme strain, and natural disasters will not only continue but worsen under climate change. How can we build resilient communities amid myriad risks? 

Aktipis designed the exercise, expecting some organic expressions. Groups followed the directions in all kinds of ways—some divided labor, choosing to act like a band rather than clapping in unison; some stood in a circle, others in a line. But some people also did more or less than others. “I spent a lot of time talking about how you can have cheaters or defectors having the highest payoff. But all cooperators can have higher payoffs,” she said.

Understanding cooperation

Her research partner Lee Cronk, an anthropologist at Rutgers University, did not discover the importance of cooperation until the middle of his career. Early on, fueled mainly by intellectual curiosity, he studied why hunter gatherers became pastoralists. Then one day in 2005, while studying Maasi culture, he tripped onto something practical. “It was the first time the people I was interested in got excited about the questions I was asking,” he said. Before that, “They tolerated the questions. This was the first time people got excited—like I was finally asking about something that was important.” 

The Maasai have a gift-giving system called osotua—which means umbilical cord. Essentially, Maasi herders choose with whom to share risk: herders share livestock with partners in times of need without any expectation of repayment. 

First, he explored the practice through interviews. Then he set up an experimental game to get quantitative data. He began to realize that one reason “nomadic pastoralism could exist was with a risk pooling system,” he said. 

Around that time, he began meeting with Aktipis due to her expertise with computational modeling and eventually formed The Human Generosity Project. They published their first paper together in 2011. “We discovered through games and models that the system was not a random gift giving system. It was well-designed. It wasn’t just about being generous. It was about being generous in specific ways,” he said.  

Of course, “One society is just one data point,” said Cronk. So, they kept studying other cultures. “We found a lot of similarities across societies.” 

A Maasai graduate student connected Cronk and Aktipis with ranchers in New Mexico and Arizona, where he once participated in a cultural exchange. So, they visited two counties along the southern border to interview and survey local ranchers.

When ranchers do favors for each other, they generally expect the help will be returned at some point. But during emergencies, such as an illness, injury or death, neighbors will step up and help a rancher in dire need without any expectation of repayment. 

While others have argued that expectations of reciprocity have more to do with social distance from the beneficiary (are they related?), Cronk and Aktipis propose it pertains more to the predictability of the need.

Cronk compared rancher assistance to insurance. “You want to pay your premiums and never file a claim,” he said. 

As Cronk, Aktipis, and their colleagues have documented, many cultures have risk pooling systems, from osotua to Southwest ranching culture to modern insurance companies. 

But “risk pooling systems make the most sense when the needs are the ones that arise out of blue,” said Cronk. What’s harder is when the whole group is hit simultaneously with an emergency. That’s where the Ik of northeastern Uganda come in. 

They endeavored to study the Ik, which were known by scholars to be stingy in order to address critiques that they were choosing groups that are known to be cooperative.

In 1972, anthropologist Colin Turnbull published “The Mountain People,” an ethnography which became widely popular after reviews in The New York Times and Time magazine and praise from Margaret Mead. In his words, he described them as “the loveless people,” “unfriendly,” “uncharitable” and “mean.”

As part of the Human Generosity Project, Cathryn Townsend, a Baylor University anthropologist, went to Uganda to conduct interviews and experimental games among the Ik. She found a strong ethic of sharing in contrast with Turnbull’s characterization. While Turnbull later acknowledged that a famine took place during his field work, he did not account well for how that would affect their society.

“They’re not the horrible people because they’re not starving anymore,” said Cronk.  

The case of the Ik illustrates how societies lose the ability to cooperate during times of extreme scarcity. But “even when conventions of generosity collapse owing to extremely stressful conditions, as reportedly occurred among the Ik, it is possible for them to completely re-emerge within 50 years,” Townsend and colleagues wrote. 

How to improve social networks to protect from future risks 

On the other side of this research, Cronk and Aktipis continue to consider how to share their gained understandings so groups can build better risk pooling strategies. 

Aktipis said that some societies scale up to shoulder the risk of being hit simultaneously by an emergency. For example, the Maasai’s sharing relationships can span large distances—they are not necessarily neighbors. Likewise, in Fiji, people share both within villages and between villages.

Cronk wondered if there’s a role for even informal global relationships. For example, he heard about the city of Phoenix gathering money to assist its sister city Chengdu, China when an earthquake hit in 2008. Likewise, when there was a shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) during the COVID-19 pandemic, residents of Chengdu sent masks to Phoenix. The cities connected through Sister Cities International, which builds long-term cultural and educational relationships between two cities who agree to connect for any number of reasons, including trade relations, ancestral connections, or historical ties and more. Though Sister Cities wasn’t founded as a mutual aid organization, the existing connection the cities had built was enough to active spontaneous giving.  

Perhaps fostering cultural exchange and education is a mechanism to forming risk-sharing relationships, said Aktipis. One Australian scholar Xuemei Bai argues for more formalization of such intercity relationships. 

Cronk said that building resilience should begin with community groups that are already well-respected, such as churches and synagogues. But overall, “we have a lot of ideas and practical advice for regular people, but we can’t yet claim to have gone in there and helped a community do this kind of stuff,” said Cronk. 

Cronk has put his energy toward pulling together broad lessons into a handbook and building instructional materials to use in the classroom. 

Aktipis said she’s long planned to focus her career on sharing important research applications with others. “Something clicked for me maybe about six months ago,” she said. 

People might think of learning how to share in kindergarten, but society needs education to go deeper. “We ought to teach cooperation alongside reading, writing, and arithmetic as a basic skill,” said Cronk. “You can’t just know it automatically. It’s not that hard but you do have to deliberately learn.”

In a complicated world filled with risks and unforeseeable disasters, Lee and Aktipis think the urgency is there to activate societies to address seemingly intractable problems through improved cooperation. If we do, everyone benefits.