Hi, I'm Paul Verschuren today with my colleagues Jenna Bednar and Andreas Rupstorf.
We're speaking with Robert Axelrod about the foundations of collaboration.
Professor Robert Axelrod is a political scientist and the William D.
Hamilton Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan.
Robert has been the author of many scientific articles and especially the 1981
paper The Evolution of Cooperation, co-authored with Bill Hamilton,
is considered a classic in the field.
This is the Convergent Science and Instrument Forum podcast on collaboration.
And today, me, Paul Verzsior, with my colleagues Jenna Bettner and Andreas Rupstorf
are talking with Robert Axelrod on the topic of collaboration.
So welcome, Robert. Thank you. Welcome. Thanks for inviting me.
So, Robert, just to start off.
Could you give us a short description of your professional trajectory to give
us a bit of a sense where you're coming from and where you are now and all the
steps in between that matter to our conversation?
Sure. Well, I'm a political scientist who has long been interested in international
security affairs and often use agent-based modeling and game theory to study
and analyze such situations.
I've also been interested in evolutionary biology and I've used some evolutionary
concepts in my political science work.
Work um my i'm at the university of michigan uh i've recently retired but i'm
still active um uh my two major i had many collaborations uh,
one was an evolutionary biologist william hamilton and more recently was an
oncologist at cancer expert Kenneth Fienta. We can talk about those or others.
Would you like more elaboration on my career?
No, look, whatever you feel is relevant as an introduction. So it's really up to you.
I'm not going to sway you one way or the other. But if you think that's enough
as a start, then we're ready to go.
So the topic is collaboration.
So what is it and what is it good for?
Well, in an academic setting where I am,
collaboration often takes the form of two or more scholars or students working
on a single project with the hope that they can do something that none of them could have done alone.
And in many cases in my career,
there have been interdisciplinary collaborations, I mean political scientists
who worked with somebody from outside political scientists or even outside of social sciences.
But in some sense, you now give an example of where it occurs,
but in some sense the question would now be what are really the defining features?
What makes something a collaboration?
I think the basic defining feature is two or more people working on the same
problem with mutual support, as opposed to completely independently sewing it together at the end.
But then you could argue that, okay, we have cooperative systems and collaborative
systems, so why don't we just give them one label?
Because there in all cases we have agents doing things together right so it
seems that there are more nuances here at work so what would these be well I
think collaborative efforts um.
Tend to be cooperative so i think collaboration is a subset uh but it is um,
exploiting the differences between the participants uh the different things
they bring to it the diversity uh they of talents and background and perspectives and goals,
uh whereas cooperation where it's cooperation could be for example it's just
uh i trade something with you and you give me money.
And so cooperation is a much broader term.
And certainly, we usually think of collaboration as necessarily human,
although you could say that ants collaborate as well.
But now, would that difference be, let's say that there's in the collaboration
case, an explicitly defined goal in a corporation case, there's some happenstance
interaction of exchange.
Is that what you're going to? Yeah, collaboration typically involves,
as I've said, a common purpose and the development of a common product,
something that they achieve together.
And it also typically involves some specialization, people having different
things that they bring to the team.
With your background, also, as you said earlier, your interest in evolutionary
biology and your identity as a political scientist,
do you then also see continuity here in this process of collaboration across
different kinds of biological systems?
Systems from let's say in case
your cancer example cells interacting together differentiating in specific ways
to interacting conscious and intentional agents like humans do you see a continuum
there is that also what you what you are pointing to here yes uh well i'll give you an example um.
And cancer involves cells, lines, developing the ability to overcome about seven
or eight defenses that the host has to keep the cells in line.
And the convention of wisdom was that one cell line based on a lot of mutations
would develop these abilities to overcome all those defenses.
I came up with an analogy much later, which goes like this.
Imagine two thieves trying to rob a house.
If one of them can pick the lock and the other one could turn off their wire,
but they don't both have to have all the capacity to overcome the defenses.
So that's a case of collaboration. It's also an example of cooperation.
So I worked with a geneticist and an oncologist to develop this concept,
see if it was even feasible.
Later, it's been found to be valid in lab experiments. It actually happened.
So that's collaboration within a tumor.
In addition, you might say the same example can be used to study collaboration.
I seem to have lost my picture here for some reason. I didn't lose your picture.
But would you then say that collaboration defined in this way,
also with the cancer example would fit in
this broader category of an emergent phenomenon of
sort of interacting elements that create
a higher level structure yes absolutely but i was also going to add that that
same example of tumors is a collaboration between uh three scientists uh bringing
different things to the table.
And so there's collaboration within the tumor and there's collaboration within
the academic study of studying that.
But sure, no, I understand that Nosara discussion in that sense is collaborative.
But in some sense, if you now bring it to this underlying issue of the commons,
right, that is supposedly playing a structuring role in human collaboration,
what will be the commons in the case of cancer?
Well, the cancer case, the...
You might say the common evolutionary path of the cells in the tumor are to
multiply and increase as they are in every biological system.
Some of these cells can be evoking something called VEGF, which encourages capillaries,
which encourages blood supply, which encourages oxygen.
So one of them might be promoting oxygen in the immediate area,
and the other one might be promoting some other nutrient.
And so the common purpose, I mean, there's no common purpose defined by the
evolutionary process itself,
but the result could be at the emergent property of a malignant tumor.
In the case of typically human collaboration, there's often a specific goal
that either has been handed to them as team members or they develop themselves.
But notice that the goals of the humans could be quite different.
One of them might be after fame and getting credit and promotion in the organization.
The other one might be an attempt to try to solve a problem and care more about
the problem than their personal credit.
So collaboration doesn't necessarily require complete agreement on the goals.
Yeah, we've been active in the chat, Bob, because this is raising a lot of super
interesting questions for us.
So there's a couple of C words for, I think, that we're throwing around here.
We're talking about cooperation, collaboration, the commons, right?
But we can also talk about collusion, right?
And the existence, I guess, of club goods, excludable goods.
So when we're talking about a common interest or common purpose,
I'm wondering to what extent, and it's interesting that we're talking about two different systems.
The human system where there's rational forethought and then this biological
system where there isn't.
And so we're talking about whether there needs to be completely overlapping
common goals or whether there can be some differentiation in that.
And then also at the level of when we're talking about cancer cells.
If the cancer cells are successful, they're actually going to kill the host,
which is going to lead to their own death.
So that's an interesting thing to unpack.
And at the human level, an interesting thing to unpack is to the extent that
this interest is held in common across all members of the group and includes
also benefits to those outside of the group.
So that's a lot of threads that I've just thrown out to you,
but just because this is already a quite rich conversation.
So any of that that you want to pick up on, and I'm sure that my colleagues
will follow up on any piece that we want to continue with.
We've already talked a little bit about the first three. On collusion,
I see collusion as cooperation in the service of exploiting others.
An example would be two major companies work together to set high prices.
And so it's what we call a restraint of trade.
And so that kind of business collusion is done often in secret so that the outsiders
who are being disadvantaged don't even necessarily know the collusion is happening.
But is that what the cancer cells are doing then?
It's exploitation of others. Yes.
Okay and of course as you said I can't fortunately cancer,
evolutionary process as you said is a dead end mm-hmm mm-hmm and that's the
tragedy of the commons for the cancer cells right yeah exactly so they're destroying
the host that nurtures them,
the better they do the more likely they're going to kill everything,
that's well kill their environment fortunately it's not infectious so they don't
kill others humans But they kill themselves.
That's right. Yes, that's right. So it reminds me a little bit of climate change. Yes.
Andreas, you wanted to step in. Yes. So, Bob, I would like to return to your
article, Achieving Cooperation Under Anarchy, Strategies and Institutions from, I think, 1985, right?
Which really sets kind of the
ground for a lot of current thinking about collaboration and cooperation.
And in that one, you were really using the powers of game theory as a way to
outline the kind of dilemmas that one might end up in.
Could you maybe start by telling a little bit about what would be the difference
between being in a stack hunt or being in a prisoner's dilemma or in another
of these situations when you are mutually trying to collaborate with each other?
Well collaboration itself could be a prisoner's dilemma it could be that two
members of the team each have an incentive to shirk that is to say let the other guy do all the work,
but if they both shirk of course then the collaboration doesn't accomplish anything,
and whereas um if they're in a if the collaboration goes on for some time uh
each Either party might say to the other,
well, if you shirk, I'll shirk, but if you're willing to give your contribution,
I'll make a contribution too.
We can even play tit for tat, which is to say, I'll start by giving some effort to this collaboration.
Then if you cooperate by giving effort as well, then I'll continue so.
But if you start shirking and not giving any effort, then I'll stop too,
and then you'll realize that that was a losing proposition for both of us.
So even within a collaboration, you can have a prisoner's dilemma between the participants.
But I guess what this suggests is that the understanding of the situation is
a critical part of a collaboration, right?
Or the mutual understanding of the situation is a critical part of the collaboration.
Well, they can have quite different conceptions of what it's about and what their goals are.
They do have to appreciate, however, that the process is interactive.
What I do and what you do jointly determine the payoffs to both of us.
They have to at least understand that, so that when the other side...
If you stop making effort, you come to realize that the other side might stop
too, and that's better than both of you working.
But you could have quite different understandings of the situation.
For example, as I said, you might have different goals and you might have different
understandings of what resources are available to the collaborators.
You might have different understandings
of who your audience is and what you're trying to accomplish.
For example, in many organizations, two members of the same team might report
to different bosses, and each one of them has the goal of satisfying their own boss.
And so they don't necessarily have
to have the same goals or even the same understanding of the situation.
They have this minimal need to appreciate that if they don't cooperate,
the other side probably won't either.
And of course, critical to the game's theoretical approaches is the identification
of a payoff matrix, right?
But in a lot of kind of, I guess, real life situations, the payoff matrix is
not quite so clear cut. There is a lot of uncertainty with it.
And can you say anything about from your kind of perspective,
what do you do or what sustains collaboration then in situations where the payoff
matrix might be unknown?
Well, typically, it might have a certain amount of uncertainty and error and
noise in judging it, but it's rarely completely unknown.
If it's completely unknown, then you'd have no reason to collaborate because
you don't know whether to do anything or not.
Um so i
i i accept that uh some uh
uncertainty about exactly what it is is common and and some notion even of whether
the other guy cooperated recently uh you're never sometimes you've never been
sure of that um so there could be misperception and noise um but there has to be,
some understanding that your choices affect the other side and their choices affect yours.
And just for the example for the prisoner's dilemma, you just have to have an
understanding that you're the right order of the payoffs.
So you have to have, in a prisoner's dilemma, what defining feature is that.
The best payoff for you is if you shirk and the other guy does all the work.
The next best is if both of you work, and the next best is if neither of you
work, and the worst is if you do all the work and the other guy shirks.
And so that's all that you really need for the prisoner's dilemma is just an
understanding of the order of those possibilities,
which is pretty common, namely that you do better by shirking,
but you both do better by cooperating.
Now, Bob, do you feel that these kinds of models from game theory alike we now
describe in the person's dilemma are still valid?
I mean, they also have been criticized in caricatures, if you want,
of human decision-making.
Herb Simon already started with this, right, with this whole notion of bounded rationality.
There's also more and more evidence that humans are not optimizers always.
We don't optimize really for outcome.
We might have surprising deviations from that. So do you feel that that's still
an effective model to look at the kinds of collaboration that we would like
to optimize in everyday life and in our world?
Well, traditional game theory and how it began does assume rational actors who
have the ability to do foresightful analysis, look ahead, if I do this,
you do that sort of thing.
So that's true but evolutionary game
theory has been able to drop the assumption of rationality
so for example these cancer cells are not rational they don't look ahead they
don't do any calculation um but uh but they can still cooperate from an evolutionary
perspective which is to say what because whatever works well means that they reproduce more.
And so the prisoners of land, for example, and game theory in general,
no longer require rationality. It's sometimes a useful assumption in order to make predictions.
And sometimes the predictions are wrong if the players aren't rational.
But there's a downside to that, right? Because then we sacrifice the goal-directedness,
the coordination of human agents in collaborative contexts.
And we are back into a more behaviorist perspective on how human behavior comes
about, which also has not been a complete success story.
So there is a price you then pay if you bring it into this pure evolutionary,
non-rational perspective.
Or do you feel that's just a necessary step? Well, for humans,
another version of evolutionary, another aspect that's not rational is trial and error learning,
where you don't necessarily look ahead, but you experience whether you're doing
well or not, and you change behavior if you're not doing well.
So trial and error learning is another form of adaptation that humans can do, and of course always do,
that's different from rationality, but it's often a very effective thing.
Go ahead, Jenna. Sorry. Oh, no, thank you.
You know, we can have biases, we have fears, et cetera.
And so, you know, what role does that play? To what extent could we incorporate
that into our game theoretic analyses successfully, make it work for us,
not against us, as we're trying to understand human collaboration?
But let me give you a specific example.
Last week, I was, no, three weeks ago, I was talking to Chinese and Russian
academics and think tank type people,
an ongoing discussion of cyber conflict and how to avoid instability.
Stability and the uh
point of what i said was beware of
vengeance so this is one of the psychological features of humans that jenna
was talking about which is uh when we feel insulted or exploited or disgraced
or punished without reason uh we often have a very powerful psychological need for vengeance,
which often then we act on without much regard to the costs and benefits.
We sort of put all that future-oriented thinking ahead and say,
well, vengeance really feels good. I need to do it.
And that's very dangerous.
And if you're in a realm like cyber conflict where cyber weapons are used at
scale, there's a lot of possibilities that people will feel the need for vengeance if attacked.
And the implication, of course, is that we should really be aware of that when
we try to understand the consequences of our own actions.
So is it enough to say beware of vengeance, or is there then some guidance about
how to avoid it? Oh, yeah.
I mean, the guidance is to take into account what the other side might regard
as requiring vengeance.
Well, here's a good example. Pearl Harbor. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor
and then knew that the United States was stronger.
Stronger, but they didn't have a clear understanding of what would happen next,
except that for six months they would be able to conquer everything in sight,
but after that they'd be short of resources.
I think that the United States' reaction to Pearl Harbor, among other things,
was a strong desire for vengeance.
That kept us going. uh and in
a way where the japanese thought well maybe americans will let
bygones be bygones they'll take the philippines and indonesia and malaysia and
indo-china but then we'll let it we'll just let it all um regardless of the
fate of complete uh but in fact we didn't of course and i think part of the
reason we didn't was vengefulness so i think the uh.
One policy application is to be cognizant of what the other side,
in this case, America for Japan, what the other side might regard as vengeful action.
And if you do it, you better do it with your eyes open. Otherwise, you better avoid it.
But Bob, there's something that I cannot fully understand. Maybe you can explain
that, because vengefulness, the wish for revenge, is a very individually defined emotional state.
And now we describe it at the level of a nation state. Well,
because it's shared by lots of individuals, yeah.
Yeah, no, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say the United States was in a vengeful mood.
Or after 9-11, we were in a vengeful mood.
And of course we invaded Afghanistan and eventually killed bin Laden part of
the motivation of Afghanistan was certainly vengeance,
fine I understand but the point is of course there are many layers now between
that right so we have institutions we have larger groups of humans that all
coalesce into something like a nation state so how would that percolate between
these levels of course you can say well they respond to this
to the sense of vengefulness in the individual citizen.
But still, how is that then incorporated in all the institutional layers that you have to go through?
Well, in this case, I mean, sometimes that can be very complicated.
Like you're trying to pass a law to slow down pollution.
You know, you have to take into account all those layers.
But in some of the cases I've cited, it's very straightforward because in both
of those examples, was American citizens shared the experience of being attacked.
They shared the experience of feeling that it was not an appropriate response to anything they did.
And the leaders felt the same way. And so there was strong support in both those
cases at all levels. So it didn't get complicated.
You didn't have to worry about the role of Congress.
You didn't have to worry about interest groups and so on.
And because there was such a widespread understanding of the situation,
it's calling for vengeance. and there was already identification and loyalty to the nation.
So when Pearl Harbor was attacked, it wasn't just Hawaiians that felt attacked.
It was all Americans felt attacked.
And likewise, 9-11, it wasn't just New Yorkers that felt attacked.
There was already this strong common understanding that the whole of the United States was attacked.
And so to summarize that, sometimes the situation is simple enough that you
don't have to worry about all the intervening stages.
They all operate smoothly.
But Bob, there's another aspect to this, right?
So Japan was in a systematic war of conquest already since the 1930s.
Also, when they attacked Pearl Harbor, they were performing many military operations
around the Pacific. And their goal was to knock out the U.S.
Of the war in one blow because they hoped to find all the ships there.
And in the meantime, in parallel, the United States was in a competition,
if you want, also for resources in the Pacific.
So I could also give an alternative interpretation where I say,
well, at the nation-state level, it was also a competition for control and resource.
But to mobilize the citizenry,
we use the sense, we enhance the sense of vengeance to mobilize the individuals
in our society to actually volunteer to go to the army and sacrifice things
so that we can achieve the goals we have as a nation state, which are not the same as vengeance.
Well, I agree that the goals involve resources and power politics, but I'm just saying that,
the motivation to declare war on Japan on December 7th and not a month before or not a year before,
the situation from the American point of view didn't change dramatically in
in the weeks leading up to Pearl Harbor. So, um.
And so the reaction was definitely triggered, you might say, by that event.
Now, of course, what we did about it did require leadership,
including decisions such as how much of American resources should be devoted
to the European theater to fight the Nazis and how much should be devoted to Japan.
Yeah, that does require leadership, and you might study the institutions in
order to understand that choice.
So as we're teasing this apart, it almost sounds like there might be two different
kinds of psychological processes going on.
Maybe at the elite level, we've got a rational calculus of the appropriate actions
for the state to take, but because it's a democracy,
we need the support of the public, and so the elites can use emotion to get the public on board.
Would you say that might be? That often happens. The clearest case may be the Spanish-American War.
Also, the Mexican-American War, where the leadership led the way for the public
to support the goals of the war.
And it wasn't sort of spontaneous from the bottom up the way it was in 9-11 or Pearl Harbor.
And certainly, the leaders do try to mold public opinion.
I remember Roosevelt had a famous line to one of the people urging him to take action.
He said, well, you've convinced me, now go out and convince the public.
So that they will force me to do it, or in a way, please support me doing it.
Yeah, so there are certainly complex interactions between the public and the leadership.
And once you get into that, then you might well need to get into the institutional
structures that mediate that difference, such as elections or the legislature.
Yeah, and the public, I mean, it may be that they're unable to see as clearly
as the elites, um, are, are interested in acting or not acting.
Um, but then it's also probably the case that an awful lot of information cannot
be shared with the public.
So there's, there's, um, uh, um, covert information that just can't be released.
Um, do you think, you know, of course, in, uh, in our country,
Bob, um, we're all sort of, um, thinking about the implications of the the United
States pulling out of Afghanistan.
Do you think that this dynamic that you've been describing with Japan is happening
in reverse in Afghanistan in the sense that the public just can't see our common
interest in being present in Afghanistan anymore,
and the leadership isn't able
to make a convincing, compelling argument to bring the public along? on?
Well, in this case, I don't think the leadership of the Biden administration,
sees value in continuing the war.
I don't think that they feel compelled by a public.
I think they felt that they had quite a lot of choice about whether to declare
a date by which thing we withdraw.
You made a comment about the fact that the elites are rational,
and I would say not necessarily.
They sometimes make choices that, after the fact, we think were made for bad reasons,
and not just bad information, but just not very carefully thought out.
I mean, I've already mentioned Japanese case. I thought that was an irrational decision.
Well, so if I ask, another thing to make a comment about Jenna's statement that
sometimes the leaders can't share information, that's true.
And then one of the factors that come into play is trust.
Does the public trust the leaders? If they say this is the thing where the United
States should do, trust me, do they trust them?
And I think a major loss in the
last four years in the United States is a decline in trust of government,
for good reason.
Well, it would be great to develop this notion of trust a bit further,
because it seems to be critical both when dealing with an uncertain situation or an uncertain payoff.
Of, it also seems to be critical in, so to say, linking up the individual level
and the institutional level.
So could you say also theoretically a bit more about what are you thinking about
trust in terms of importance for collaboration?
And how has the importance of trust or the understanding of the role of trust
changed over the last years in your thinking?
Well, typically, collaboration does require trust. It requires trust that the
other person will give an honest effort, show up and do their part before you
actually find out if that's true.
You can commit yourself to participating in this activity, trusting that it
will be mutually valuable.
In international affairs, in the cyber context,
the Russians and Chinese have told the Americans that trust is perhaps the most
important thing in order to make progress in avoiding war and escalation.
And game theory has done some work on what is required to build trust,
but I think it has a lot more to offer.
And certainly collaboration, as I said, requires a certain amount of trust.
And trust, I guess, is also related to another critical issue,
which has to do with the temporal extension of the collaboration or the exchange, doesn't it?
Because trust seems also to be about projecting into a future.
So is that an area to develop further? further, also theoretically,
the relation between, you can say, future thinking and trust?
Absolutely. In fact, one of the major conclusions of my work on cooperation
was the importance of what I call the shadow of the future,
the idea that both sides know that there's going to be a continuing relationship in economic terms,
that they don't discount the future or too much that they find the future is
worth worrying about and worth sacrificing today by taking a chance on trust
in order to see if you can get the long-term benefits.
So trust definitely can be built up by an appreciation that you're in this for the long term.
So, Bob, we looked at a number of key features now, right?
So the last one being trust, and then also the shadow of the future.
But if we want to put these all together in a comprehensive framework,
we could argue that also that collaborative system, as we also just described,
going from citizens through institutions to a president, in the end has some sort of architecture.
Where we have a functional decomposition, we have protocols of communication,
we have mechanisms in which incentives are distributed through the system and so on.
So would you see it in those terms? Do you think we can look at collaborative
processes from that perspective of an architecture?
And if so, what would the main features of that architecture be?
Well, one of the main features of the architecture is the extent to which the
goals are set by an outside agent, such as the boss within an organization.
To the extent that two members of a collaborative team are working for the same
boss and have the goal of making the boss happy with their work,
that's a pretty strong architecture and a pretty strong way of setting goals and monitoring them.
But often, participants in the collaboration don't have a common boss that sets
the terms of the collaboration, and they've got to work that out together.
Sometimes explicitly, such as,
for example, if there's a treaty between two countries or a contract between
two companies. I'll provide this if you provide that.
So sometimes it's formalized between the participants themselves,
but often it's less structured by a good deal. There's a handshake.
Let's work on this together. And there's no formal contract and there's not
necessarily a detailed definition of what this is that we're working on or how
much you'll do and how much I'll do.
Sometimes there's a collaboration, there's an explicit statement that I'll provide
this if you provide that, based often on specialization.
So, for example, when I collaborated with evolutionary biologists,
William Hamilton, to develop the biological implications of the prisoner's dilemma.
We had an understanding of what his strong suit was, and he could provide lots
of examples for biology for what I was talking about.
And I could provide some of the results of my computer tournaments and analyze them.
And so we shared a common interest and understanding of both evolutionary theory and game theory.
And that helped us work together effectively, even though our backgrounds.
I mean, he knew a lot about Beatles and I knew a lot about war.
Those two knowledge bases didn't overlap. Right.
But now if I understand you right, Bob, then you're saying there is a hierarchical
structure of goals and sub-goals, if you want.
But now for the agents in the system to pursue those goals, we have something
like trust, which also means by implication, we assume that all these agents have a theory of mind.
Because that's why you need trust because you have a model of the other agent
that says, well, they can do bad things, they can do good things,
and I just make the assumption they will do good things. That's trust, right?
So now that already gives us elements of this architecture, but now you have
protocols of communication, right?
That both has to run within layers and between layers.
So do you have a specific view on what the features of that kind of communication
structure then should be key to maintain your goal structure.
Well, it's often said that a major impediment to interdisciplinary collaboration
is that the two sides don't speak the same language.
So when I started working on cancer, I certainly didn't speak the language of
the cancer specialists.
And there was a huge variety of specialized terms.
You don't have to master the 6,000 terms that are in the index of a major cancer textbook,
but you do have to learn a lot about what p53 is, for example, and why it's important,
and VEGF and a million, several hundred other things. and so developing mutual
understanding is often part of the collaborative process.
Andreas? Yeah, so I think this is very interesting that the moment we started
out with architectures, but the moment we go to the scientific collaborations,
we are, so to say, back again in this more anarchistic realm where there is
not a clear hierarchy of a shared boss and a shared goal and yet people figure
out ways of collaborating.
So is it maybe time to think a little bit more about what does it take for these
interdisciplinary collaborations to actually work?
Is there still kind of a commitment to some overarching shared goal or shared
cause, be it the advent of knowledge or the increase of knowledge that stabilizes it?
Or what does it then take for these agents who are in very separate systems
actually to create this space in the middle between them.
And I think the interdisciplinary collaborations are really interesting instances of that.
Well, in the cases of my collaborations, which I think are typical,
although they're much more heavily interdisciplinary than most collaborations are,
the project started with the shared goal of achieving a new understanding of
some, a better understanding of some phenomena in the outside world,
such as say an arms race or cancer,
and that the intention usually among academics is that this would lead to at
least one publication as a concrete output of this collaboration.
Sometimes part of the goal is just having fun. I find it fun to work with people
that know a lot of things that I don't know, and to understand their perspective.
And a lot of science, of course, is driven by curiosity and the desire to kind
of play with ideas and concepts,
obviously with the purpose behind that of advancing understanding and knowledge,
but not necessarily a material purpose such as getting a raise.
So, in your background for us, you shared your presidential address to the American
Political Science Association called Political Science and Beyond.
And in that one, you also talk about, you know, the four ops that you need to
cultivate as a researcher.
It's reading up on a variety of fields. It's teaming up with others.
It's about loading up on research related to your problem.
And it's about lighting up when you need to escape from the problem for a while.
So, with four principles, in a sense, also count as general principles that
are useful to initiate collaborations because each of them,
in a sense, seems to assume that you need to bring yourself into a particular
state to allow these kind of collaborations to happen.
Well, yes, and you certainly, I call those things the four ups and they're on
my website and people want to check out what they mean.
I think the most interesting way is the last one
the lighten up and what are the points i make which i
have to found in myself is that uh when
either in a collaboration or working on your own you get to a dead end uh uh
you beat your head against the wall uh it pays to lighten up it face to back
off and sleep on and turn to some other project for a while in order to get
out of the current mode of thinking that you're stuck with.
So, Bob, that makes me think a little bit more about what would cause a collaboration
that ought to continue to fail.
And so, you know, or another way of thinking about that is what makes a collaboration robust?
So what is it...
So in your sense, what do you think about what causes something to fail or what
would, alternatively, how could you structure it so that it would be able to
continue despite being hit by, you know, in this sense,
you know, maybe people's distraction from other projects that are pulling them away?
Well, I'll give you one example of a failure that I was involved with,
which is this story about cooperation among cancer cells done with Dr.
Kev Pienta. So when we sent that off to a major journal, we got two reviews.
We got two reviews and of course what we were doing was somewhat speculative
and one review says it's impossible what they're proposing this kind of cooperation and the other journal,
the other reviewers say oh everybody knows this already,
so honestly that was a failure it was a failure to get the thing published in
that journal and it was also a failure of our um,
ability to communicate what we were trying to do to show that it wasn't impossible
and it was different from what people already knew.
And the way we proceeded was to give up on that journal and take responsibility
for explaining what's new here and why it was at least possible.
And so it took a certain amount of perseverance. But when you got reviews that
said it's impossible, but everybody knows it already, that was pretty discouraging.
Yeah.
Bobby, if I could just then follow up on this one, because this notion of lighten
up, as you say, seems to be really important to actually keep collaborations going, right?
Now, if we are to return to the payoff matrix, is there a payoff matrix of lightening
up? How do we think of something like the lightening up in terms of an economic game?
Because it seems to open for a very different dimension that precisely is about
exploring trust, exploring kind of a long-term being in the game together,
exploring ways of, in a sense, creating a shared understanding or exploring
the shared understanding.
Does that have a payoff matrix in a more traditional sense? Or how do we think of it?
Well, I would think of it as not in the payoffs, but in the discount rate.
That is to say, how patient or impatient are you?
How much does the future count as opposed to getting immediate awards?
And if the collaboration, for example, is set up in a business organization
where you have one month in order to increase profits or else you're a failure,
Well, then, obviously, you can't lighten up. You've got to work hard on that problem.
But if you take a long-term perspective because your discount rate isn't too
high because you value the future, then you might come to the conclusion with
your colleagues in the collaboration that what you're doing now isn't working.
You ought to step back and, for example, examine the premises,
examine why you structured the the search for a solution in the way you did,
or whether there's other ideas that are completely different from the ones that
you've been trying to build on.
And so I see it not so much as a change in the payoff matrix as a change in
the discount rate and awareness and a realization that to make progress, you might have to give up,
making progress in the short run, which wasn't working anyway,
in order to do some more exploration of distant possibilities that might pay off later.
Thank you.
Don't typically think about when we're doing game theoretic analyses generally
in game theory. We think in terms of extrinsic rewards.
But there's also an intrinsic reward.
And here I'm thinking in particular about the Bach group,
which is for everyone else, this is a group that Bob was a part for a long time,
a beautiful collaboration in a sense of meeting of fellow scientists that I
don't think had a specific purpose other than being a place where you could
share ideas in progress.
And so you didn't have a sense of a definite goal beyond that in terms of a common publication.
And yet it was incredibly important to all of you who were participating in it.
And so a big part of that was the connection between fellow human beings.
So what role do you think this connectedness between humans plays in fostering
collaboration, successful collaboration,
and getting you over some hurdles and making it more robust?
Yeah.
You're quite right to emphasize the importance of human relationships,
and in particular in collaboration, what could be fun of working with other people.
There's been work, for example, on political mobilization, such as working for
a candidate or a party or a cause.
Because I was often found in that setting is that people get together for a
purpose of accomplishing something, for example, women's rights or sustainability environment.
But they often stay because of the personal rewards of working with like-minded people.
So it can often be an extrinsic motivation for a common cause,
but that the sustaining feature is that they enjoy working together.
It's sort of like it could be a club.
And what often helps promote successful collaboration is if at least one of
the members explicitly attend to their interpersonal relations.
For example, say to somebody, you know, you've You contribute a lot,
but why don't you listen to other people a little bit better?
Well, I'm not very good at being tactful, so that's a bad way to put it.
But there's often been found in collaborative groups that one person takes on
the role of a task leader, focusing on the task,
and somebody else typically takes the role of a solidarity leader who is attentive
to the interpersonal relationships relationships and works to keep those on keel.
So, Bob, on the one hand, just a quick reaction to the issue of the lightening up.
It's very reminiscent of this idea of incubation that goes back to the theory
of creativity of Helmholtz, where it's like you expose yourself to something,
and then there's a period of distancing, of incubation, after which insight would follow.
And I find it a curious overlap, which might be worth pursuing on some other occasion.
On the other hand, if I listen to you, I also feel that there's a collision
here in conceptualizations and interpretations.
Because when we talked about the cancer example, how it informs us about human collaboration,
we actually went into a model which would deny intentionality and goal setting
playing a role because it would play out as a biological mechanical process.
However, when I asked you about the architecture of collaboration,
the first thing you said was goals.
So I see a bit of a gap between these two positions that to me also show that
there's still a lot of work to be done in this field of understanding collaboration.
So I would say, what would you see as the most critical question that we have
to answer to make progress on this topic?
Well, that's a big question, and what's the most critical question to answer
to make progress on this topic?
That's what you said, and I'd say to deal with that, we should lighten up,
as to say not try to give a 30-second answer right off the top of my head,
but thinking about what's the most critical question.
Well, but you know, Bob, there's another thing about creativity,
about a historical prepared mind, right?
So I had hoped that it would just come out like that because you cannot sleep
at night because of that one question you need to answer.
That's sometimes true. Sometimes you have a question that you're pondering and it just bothers you.
I had such a thing in graduate school when I was wondering,
based on game theory, How would you measure whether a situation is very much like a zero-sum game,
or is it very much like a partnership game where the interests are completely
aligned and whatever helps one helps the other, where zero-sum,
of course, whatever helps one hurts the other?
And how would you measure that?
And I couldn't do it. uh and um i but i put it aside and several years later
uh i came back to potter to get it when i woke up one morning uh i had what
i regarded as the answer and the mathematical proof that it was,
um not all the conditions and it was the only measure that didn't meet all the
conditions and then i said well why did it take me so long and the answer it
turned out is i had to forget get something.
One of the factors I thought that
you could put into this turned out to be irrelevant and you don't need it.
After several years, when I came back to the problem, I didn't bother.
I didn't remind myself of that and that was good.
Even when you have a question that's really bothering you, lightening up can be very helpful.
Right. So my last two questions to bring us to the finish line.
Do you believe that humans will ever manage to maintain sustainable collaboration?
Well, yes, in some regards. I mean, to take an example, we have a sustainable
collaboration about what the U.S. dollar means.
Any place in the world, you can hand a person a U.S. dollar,
and they'll give you an apple or whatever.
So there's understanding. It's just a piece of paper.
Why should anybody take a green piece of paper and give you an apple?
They're not going to eat the paper. And the reason, of course,
is that we all have a common understanding that somebody else will take,
they can use that piece of paper to buy shoes or whatever.
So there's an example, and that's sustainable. It's been around for a long time,
certainly a dominant world currency for almost 100 years, and it's likely to
be sustained for quite a while.
Maybe not the only major currency that's universally recognized.
Nice but uh so that that's an example of sustainable
understanding of a situation that promotes collaboration
at a very high level now uh we need to have a sustained collaboration on climate
change and that's a toffee because everybody wants to burn coal because it's
the cheapest source of energy today but of course it's terrible and so we can
talk to each other They didn't say,
oh, we'll try to reduce our coal if you try to reduce your coal.
But there's no formal agreement or mutual monitoring or punishments for a violation of the trust.
And so there is a case where sustainable cooperation is absolutely essential.
But it's really, really hard, partly because we're organized into the nation states.
So if you now would be able to change one feature of humans,
anything, through magic, what would that one feature be?
Do nothing. And the reason I say that is if you change something,
I don't know that that would actually be an improvement considering all the
very difficult to understand side effects.
Right so I don't know you might think well I'd like to eliminate disease well
but then if people live much much longer you know there's a lot of things to
think about how good that is,
so that's why I say if I was to change one thing I'd do nothing great well thanks
a lot thank you very much for this conversation hi you listened to one of our
podcasts in the series on collaboration,
produced by the Ernst Trumman Forum and the Convergent Science Network.
You can find more episodes on our website.