Beyond
Selfishness
TMA World Viewpoint
Beyond Selfishness
By Terence Brake - Head of Learning & Innovation, TMA World
Occasionally, I come across a piece of writing
that makes me want to punch the air and shout,
“Yes!”
That happened just recently when I read
Professor Yochai Benkler’s article –
“The Unselfish Gene”
in the July-August 2011 edition of the Harvard
Business Review. What Professor Benkler does
so well, is to counter the pervasive and
pernicious view that we are all born selfish; that
we are driven by a narrow rationality focused
only on advancing our own material interests.
HELLOMy name is
TERRY
Beyond Selfishness
I first met this view of humankind – homo economicus – many years ago in
undergraduate economics classes.
I remember telling my professor
at the time that I thought that
this was a highly reductionist
and false assumption, and a
highly crude platform on
which to base economic theory.
But what
professor
listens to
undergraduate views?
Beyond Selfishness
One consequence of the self-interested rationality theory is that when building
human systems we assume the worst of everyone.
We develop incentive systems based
simply on self-interest,
the carrots and sticks approach.
Professor Benkler gives a number of examples
where self-interest doesn’t adequately explain behavior –
Wikipedia, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and open source
software like Apache.
The Web is full of cooperative activities that offer
little in terms of personal gain.
Beyond Selfishness
As well as common examples of minimally self-interested cooperation, Professor
Benkler also points to growing empirical evidence that
One interesting study, showed that in experiments about
cooperative behavior, about 30% behave selfishly.
About 50% “systematically and predictably behave
cooperatively. Some of them cooperate conditionally;
they treat kindness with kindness and meanness with
meanness. Others cooperate unconditionally, even when
it comes at a personal cost. (The remaining 20% are
unpredictable, sometimes choosing to cooperate and
other times refusing to do so.) In no society examined
under controlled conditions have the majority of
people consistently behaved selfishly.”
cooperation is not an aberration
Beyond Selfishness
What this means is that most of our incentive systems based on rewards,
punishments, and monitoring are optimized for only 30% of the population!
We need systems that stimulate:
This doesn’t mean looking at the world through
rose-colored spectacles; it means having a deeper,
more complex, appreciation of human nature.
intrinsic motivations
engagement
shared sense of purpose
To learn more about how TMA World can
help your organization, please contact us at
or visit
www.tmaworld.com/our_solutions.cfm
