Former Community – We Moved
🆕 Coached community here, for posts & feedback public community here.
Research proves "collaborative frames"
This experiment provides scientific evidence for the "cooperative frames" concept and strategy that this website first championed.
In the experiments, the participants played a form of prisoner's game with monetary pay-offs.
The main difference between the experiments is that one came was called "community game", and the other one "Wall Street game" (and corresponding names in Hebrew since it was 2 experiments with students and Israeli pilots, increasing the power of the study).
As cognitive psychologist and linguist George Lakoff well argued, names are one way of providing a frame to the game itself.
The community name, of course, encourages collaboration.
The "Wall Street" one, of course, encourages the pursuit of profit without encouraging collaboration -and, in some people's minds, it may actually encourage selfishness since some people associate Wall Street to selfishness-.
Just by changing the name, the results were starkly different:
Grey or black bars refer instead to the participants’ nomination status as most likely to cooperate versus most likely to defect, which had no predictive power at all (but consider that most people are not power aware enough to spot the small red and green flags)
That's a huge difference.
It's more than double the number of people that cooperated just by changing the name.
The researchers go on to state, correctly, that albeit the people's assessment of "more likely to cooperate or defect" was not predictive, their experiment does not prove that personality doesn't matter, which instead, they say, has also been proven to affect cooperation and defect -something we also repeat here-.
Instead, I add, it proves that people are poor at assessing others.
However, changing the context -in this case, the name/frame- was able to produce massively different results.
Now, of course, no single study can definitely prove anything.
And, probably, if the payoff amounts were much larger, things would have been different.
However, it's also true that here it was only the name of the game that changed.
A smart user of collaborative frames has on his side much more than simple single-words.
He can:
- Re-iterate the same concept again and again (hence PU stressing to "correct course" and re-frame within a relationship)
- State the costs of defection
- Prove his willingness to cooperate
- Gain goodwill over time
- Influence with judge roles
- Influence with personal high-value / leadership
- Encourage and reward cooperation
- Discourage and punish defection
- Pick better people and cooperators in his life
- ...
That’s awesome.
In other words, even if we have a taker - which we are unable to “throw out” - in front of us, we could encourage the odds of cooperation by mentioning something as:
Us: I want to stress that this work requires our joint cooperation and prompt consultation and response on every point.
(Optional for the worst takers:)
Lacking this, our joint involvement will not make sense anymore for this project.
Yeah, basically this is the experimental confirmation of what's already in PU, case studies and examples included.
This is good news and it shows the power of reframing with a simple title change. It's an empirical result and it goes in the direction that we want. That's awesome. Before we update our beliefs (for example: "framing for collaboration generally works, let's do more of that"), I for one would be careful. Because this is a result that confirms a belief I already have, I might weight it more than I should (confirmation bias, aka 'soldier mindset'). I will send people to this study when I have to make this point. Still, it's important to remember that we are talking about extremely complex social situations with people in them (often with high stakes). People are wonderfully complex, and as much as I want to simplify the world with models and theories, things don't work that way.
So my personal take (feel free to disagree, looking forward to the discussion): This is a prisoner dilemma game with no stakes, monetary or otherwise, run at an University, in a particular country and moment in time. Now is the time to see how far this result replicates in other cultures and setups (by culture I don't mean country, but the whole setup; a group of friends playing petanque is a culture for this purpose). Real cases from youtube in PU where this happens have more external validity (and weight) for me, but I'm happy to see this result and I hope it gets press and changes minds.
Agree with you, LoF, most single studies in the social sciences can provide "evidence" but certainly not "ultimate proof" of anything -and this one is no exception-.
And I also agree with you that some good real-world case studies can provide bigger evidence than many experiments can.
Still, given that there is much evidence pointing in that direction, that real-world observation and "tests" back it up, and that "it makes sense" based on what we know about people and psychology, this is not a piece of isolated evidence but, as you say, more a case of "one more pavement brick" laid on the road, and that keeps going in that direction that we expected.
