Cooperation In Cooperatives-The Subtle perspective

On the parent blog "My Experiments with reforms", , some attributes were highlighted how Disha can fail and  common mistakes that  should be avoided if one wants to avoid failure of community owned enterprises.

Seeking cooperation in cooperatives or for that matter in any activity has been a debatable issue through out history and will possibly continue in future also. While i was pnodering over this issue, I came across an interesting piece of research on Science daily of 22nd May, for reader's benefit, I have posted it verbatim

The finding comes from four new experiments carried out by researchers from Oxford University, Edinburgh University, and the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. A report of the research was recently published in PNAS.

In the four experiments 168 people played games in groups of four where they were able to choose how many of 40 monetary units they wished to contribute to a public project. Players were then rewarded according to the premium put on cooperative behaviour (contributing) as opposed to holding onto their 'money'.

'What we found was that even as we increased the premium on cooperation, so that players made most money by contributing 100 per cent of their money, on average people contributed significantly less than 100 per cent,' said Professor Stuart West of Oxford University's Department of Zoology, one of the leaders of the study. 'In fact even when full cooperation delivered the best financial returns between 66 and 94 per cent of people still saw fellow players as their competitors.'

The research shows that mistakes or 'imperfect behaviour' made by players in a game setting can lead to a systematic bias in how much or little they cooperate.

'Our results suggest that players avoid both completely 'selfish' and 'fully cooperative' behaviour, even if one of these strategies delivers maximum benefit,' said Professor West. 'This could derive from a psychology that avoids extreme behaviours, which could be very costly if they go wrong, or indicate that the sort of simple everyday rules of thumb we use to make these kind of judgements 'misfire' in an intense experimental setting.'

Results are not astonishing and this we face day in and day out. In November when the much awaited social mobilization phase will begin, possibly then on more such incidences will come to forefront.