The Cooperation Equation and Red or Green?

Bob Blain

Part I: The Cooperation Equation

For years my wife, Mary, has been urging me to write a book about cooperation. When I told her I wanted to call it The Cooperation Equation, she gasped, "That sounds like algebra. I hate algebra!" So, for Mary's sake, and I'm sure for the sake of other readers who may feel the same way about "algebra," I'm going to tell you right up front about the Cooperation Equation in non-algebraic terms. It is simply, this: Share the Work, Share the Wealth. I happen to be someone who likes algebra, so I express the same principle as:

Share the Work = Share the Wealth.

As a professional sociologist most of my life, I am trained to think scientifically. Inevitably, that means demanding evidence for reaching conclusions and evidence often means using numbers and equations, so there will be some in the book that I am writing. However, a lot of what you will find here are activities that I have done with my classes during the 35 years that I have been a University Professor of Sociology. I believe in learning by doing and I think that you will find these activities helpful in understanding the problems and potential of cooperation. In this introduction, let me tell you in narrative form the essence of the cooperation equation.

One side of the equation says, Share the work. This represents the simple fact that we humans can get a lot more work done and done better by working together. As the Chinese say, "Many hands make light work." If any one of us were alone in the world, as rich in natural resources as is this beautiful planet, we would be poor. Sure, there would be some kinds of food to eat, berries, nuts, roots, maybe small animals and fish. But where would we find tools? What would we do for a tooth ache or a broken leg? How would we know which berries were safe to eat? Where would we find shelter? What would we wear? You can probably think of other problems that we would have living alone even in paradise.

On the other hand, look at all that we have as members of a large society of cooperators. Think of all the different kinds of occupations, tens of thousands of them, that put food on the supermarket shelves, clothing and shoes in stores, that build all the different kinds of buildings we use, utilities, household appliances, health care professionals, and on and on. I am not going to glorify consumerism. On the contrary, I think we need, as R. Buckminster Fuller said so often, to find ways to do more with less. But our concern about excess should not prevent us from recognizing the cornucopia of goods and services that sharing the work has produced.

We will be looking at the problem of sharing the work more efficiently and effectively. That simple phrase, "share the work," like a term in any equation, can be analyzed into smaller components. I want to take that side of the equation apart and ask, how can be make its components more equitable. In simplest terms, how can person A and person B share the work equally?

Work by Person A ?=? Work by Person B.

The problem multiplies as the number of people increases.

I have always found it interesting that, with only two people, it is easy for both of them to know who is or is not sharing the work. For example, if the dishes are piling up in the sink, both know that neither of them is doing that work. If the dishes are clean and you did not do them, you can be sure that the other person did them. Add a third person and things become murky. If the dishes are clean and you did not do them, who did? Maybe it was person A but it could have been person B. Multiply the size of the group to ten, a hundred, a thousand, a million, and the problem of sharing the work becomes astronomical. On that scale, it is a wonder that we do as well as we do. Yet, we need to do better and my job here is to show you how we can improve how we share the work. The benefit will be more wealth with less work.

“Share the wealth” is the other side of the cooperation equation. We have trouble there as well. Once again, it is easy for two people to know if they are sharing the wealth. If you bought a delicious pecan pie and it's all gone before you get a slice, you know who ate it. If you put gas in the car and the tank is near empty, you know who drove it. If you want to take a shower but there is no hot water, you know who used it. But add a second, third, or fourth person, and identifying who used what becomes an ever more difficult problem. So "solving" the cooperation equation is also a matter of analyzing its share the wealth side as well as its share the work side. So let us begin.

Part II: Red or Green?

Imagine that you are one of many people being asked to vote Red or Green. You will give yourself points according to the following reward structure.

Text Box: If everyone votes Green, each person gets 50 points.
If some people vote Green and some vote Red, those who voted Green get 40 points, those who voted Red get 10 points.
If everyone votes Red, each person gets 10 points.

What would you do, vote Red or Green?

How many points do you give yourself? You don't know and you cannot know, because your points depend on how other people voted. That you cannot know your points without knowing how other people voted tells you that points are contingent, or dependent, on other people. The outcomes are a reward structure, that is, what happens to one person depends on what happens to other people. (You might try this with a group of friends if you want to follow the exercise all the way through. This is not necessary, however, because I will tell you how my students over the years have voted.)

In this part of the Red or Green exercise, my students vote four more times. The second time, the point values are doubled. The third time, they are doubled again (multiplied by four). The fourth time, the point values are times five. The fifth time, the point values are times 10.

Here is how my class voted yesterday (January 8, 2002).

Points	Voted Green	Voted Red
As stated above.	65	2
Doubled	54	13
Times Four.	59	8
Times Five	62	5
Times Ten	57	10

Now we repeat the exercise with the following reward structure.

Text Box: If everyone votes Green, each person gets 50 points.
If some people vote Green and some vote Red, those who voted Green get -300 points, those who voted Red get +400 points.
If everyone votes Red, each person gets -400 points.

What would you do, vote Red or Green?

Again, you cannot know how many points to give yourself because you do not know how other people voted. This again tells you that you are dealing with a reward structure, a situation where your outcome depends on how other people vote as well as on how you vote.

Students again vote four more times. The second time, the point values are doubled. The third time, they are doubled again (multiplied by four). The fourth time, the point values are times five. The fifth time, the point values are times 10.

Here is how my class yesterday voted with the second reward structure.

Points	Voted Green	Voted Red
As stated above.	8	59
Doubled	9	58
Times Four.	8	59
Times Five	10	57
Times Ten	10	57

What do you see? How did behavior change?

You can see that there was a dramatic shift. In the first part of the exercise, 89 percent of the votes were for Green. In the second part of the exercise, only 13 percent of the votes were for Green. 87 percent were for Red. How would you explain that shift?

Would you say that personality explains the shift? That would be a hard case to make because personality is a relatively stable thing. We would not expect personality to radically change from one moment to the next. Nor would we expect the personalities of 67 people to change simultaneously. We must conclude that the change in behavior is due to the only thing that changed in the exercise, namely, the reward structure.

What is the sociological significance of this exercise? The most obvious significance is that it shows how reward structures govern social behavior.

The first reward structure encouraged cooperation. If everyone had voted Green every time, each person would have received 50 points on the first vote, 100 points on the second vote, 200 points on the third vote, 400 points on the third vote, and 500 points on the fifth vote, for a total of 1,200 points. As it was, those who voted Green got 40, 80, 160, 200, and 400 for a total of 880 points. Those who voted Red got 10, 20, 40, 50, and 100, for a total of 220.

These outcomes simulate real life. When everyone shares the work and shares the wealth produced by that work, everyone does well. We can call the first version of the Red or Green exercise the Share version. The rising points each time people voted is similar to the increase in productivity over time. At first, it takes a lot of work to produce a small amount. Imagine, for example, the time when people planted seeds by pushing a pointed stick into the ground and dropping a seed into the hole. People then probably ate better than when they had to rely on wild plants for their food. When people learned to use seeds to grow crops, their more secure food supply gave them time to improve their tools. Gradually, with better tools, more food was produced and fewer people were needed to produce food. The people freed from farm work could then learn to do other things like weave clothe and build houses, which further raised the group's standard of living.

The few people voting Red with the share reward structure represent people who choose not to do their share of the work. Instead, they depend for their food on the bounty of nature or the charity of others. This behavior reduces the size of the final product, be it food, clothing, or some other commodity. So, in the exercise, when some people vote Red, the points received, which represent production, by those who vote Green are reduced. Less sharing of work results in less wealth to share.

The first time that I used the Share reward structure, I expected that everyone would vote Green, since it was obvious to me that that was how to get the most points. I was shocked when some people voted Red. I was more shocked when some people continued to vote Red even when the point values increased. I thought that this behavior might have been an aberration, something peculiar to that particular group. However, now that I have done this exercise dozens of times, I know that there are always some people who vote Red. There has never been a time in my experience when everyone voted Green. So this raises the question, why? As part of this exercise and every exercise that I use in class, I ask people to explain their votes including these exceptional votes.

The answers have been similar from group to group. Some students have said they voted Red because it was their favorite color. Others have said they voted Red because they did not understand the rules. Others have said that after they voted Red the first time, they wanted to be consistent so they voted Red every time, no matter what. But the most interesting response to me was that the Red voters thought it was a trick. They did not believe that the points meant what they seemed to mean. They thought, because voting Green was so obviously good, that I would probably tell them at the end of the exercise that points were actually bad. The reward structure, in other words, was perceived as too good to be true.

The conclusion I reached from this unexpected behavior was that we should not make 100 percent the standard for successful cooperation. Instead we should recognize that people have many reasons for how they behave. There will probably always be people who, for one reason or another, behave differently from everyone else. The reward structure can reduce (or increase) the number of people who share the work and share the wealth, but rarely if ever produce absolutely perfect sharing.

What about the people who voted Green in the second part of the exercise? They were absolutely sure to lose a lot of points. If anyone voted Red, the Greens lost 300 points. With 400 points to gain if anyone voted Green, it was almost a certainty that at least one person would vote Red. This probability was increased by having those who voted Green to indicate by raising their hands first. Yet the same number of people, 8 to 10 in the most recent class, voted Green every time. This pattern happened every time I have used this exercise. How did the Greens explain their behavior?

They said that they understood that they would lose points if anyone voted Red but they voted Green anyway because they wanted to do the right thing. They understood that positive points would happen only if someone voted Green, so they accepted their loss even though other people benefited from their loss. They wanted everyone to vote Green and hoped that everyone would follow their example. They realized that voting Green would at least prevent the final option from happening, namely, everyone losing 400 points. The Greens allowed themselves to be exploited knowing that, if they did not, the situation for everyone would be even worse.

I can't help but think of the situation with nuclear weapons today. With many thousands of such weapons of mass destruction around the world, if someone attacks with one, the attacked party will counter attack with escalation to total annihilation of life on earth. One vote Red would precipitate all vote Red to total destruction. On September 11, 2001 19 persons high jacked four commercial airlines. They crashed two of them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, causing both buildings to collapse and killing about 3,000 people. They crashed another into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. killing several hundred people. The fourth plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, apparently because passengers overpowered the hijackers, killing all on board but probably saving the lives of all the people at the intended target site.

The response of the United States Federal government was to drop massive amounts of bombs on the country of Afghanistan killing untold numbers of people. The President promises to take this "War on Terrorism" into many more countries. We are seeing Red votes being responded with Red votes. Where will it end? Where are the Green votes? Which will ultimately prevail?

I tell my students that I am glad they have no weapons for this exercise. This exercise allows us to examine our responses to others behavior in a safe way. The idea is to use this experience to examine and evaluate other real life phenomena. One of those is the lottery.

Millions of people buy lottery tickets hoping to win jackpots of millions of dollars. The winner is usually announced with a lot of fanfare. I suppose people in the audience hope someday also to be a winner. What is never said is that everyone else lost. The winner hides the millions of losers. Lottery games have become very popular. What lesson do they teach? The lesson is not much different from the one taught by the popular board game, Monopoly. In that game, there is always only one winner; everyone else loses. The lottery and Monopoly, as well as many other competitive games, are not exactly the same as the Red or Green exercise because players are all trying to "vote Red." Each is trying to make the others lose. Culturally, these games encourage competition rather than cooperation.

Two other parallels to the Hoard version of Red or Green are corporate "downsizing," where a Chief Executive Officer fires thousands of people then gets a multi-million dollar bonus and where a sports figure gets a multi-million dollar contract. There is one big winner and many losers. Thousands of people are unemployed in the first case and thousands of athletes will never get to play in the big leagues in the other case.

The advantage of the Red or Green exercise is that the situation is plain and simple. Green signifies cooperation; Red signifies conflict. In real life, it is often difficult to tell what is "Green" and what is "Red." As suggested by the examples of the lottery, downsizing, and huge sports contracts, "red" is often presented as if it were "green." Corporate heads don't say, "I fired 10,000 people and got myself a fat raise." Instead, they say that the corporation is "downsizing" to improve "efficiency" and to raise "productivity." The challenge here is to use the experience of Red or Green to question and uncover real life situations for their true "Red or Green" meaning. The goal is to identify ways to increase cooperation and reduce conflict.

Bob Blain is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. His email is rblain@siue.edu.