Hi, I'm Paul Vershoorn, together with my colleague Jenna Bednar.
We're speaking in this episode with Margaret Levy about how people with conflicting
interests manage to find ways of working together.
As a director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and
professor of political science at the Woods Institute for the Environment at
Stanford University, Margaret Margaret has worked extensively in the fields of labor politics.
Margaret, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much.
So before we really delve into the questions around collaboration and what that
means, could you situate us a little bit in your career path that brought us to today?
Well, it's been a long career. I mean, I've been around for a while,
but I've always been interested.
I mean, my dissertation was called Conflict and Cooperation.
So I've always been concerned with issues of how people who often have countering interests.
Manage to find a way to work together and develop a cooperative strategy or
collaborative strategy.
Strategy so whether i've been working at
looking at unions which i've done at multiple
times over my career labor unions or whether
i've been looking at the relationship between citizens and
government or members of an organization and their leadership um and with others
that they have to work with which has been a large part of my career um those
have been central questions to me is how people cooperate and collaborate and
the reasons why they don't.
And I think one of the things to emphasize about that is that a large focus
of mine has been about the governance or institutional arrangements and rules
that manage an organization or a group that make that easier
or harder, that create boundaries or create openings to work with others.
Right. And so currently you are at Stanford, right?
Do you have always been at Stanford or you made also a tour through different institutions?
I was for 40 years at the University of Washington. I'm retired from the University
of Washington because I took the job at Stanford and I was of the age where
it was advantageous to retire rather than to just leave.
So I have been at Stanford since 2014 as the director of the Center for Advanced
Study in Behavioral Sciences, an old and important organization.
That encourages collaboration, which is where Jenna is now a fellow.
And I'm also a professor of political science and a senior fellow in the Woods
Institute for the Environment.
Okay, great. Well, so then, Margaret, now that we know a bit of background,
what is collaboration and what is it good for?
We're starting small.
German, which we weren't quite aware of when we started writing this,
but it has multiple meanings in German.
So we can go with the positive one as opposed to the sort of Nazi variant.
And what we were really interested in is why it was that certain unions that
we observed were able to build,
and this is the answer to your question, really, were able to build a collaborative
process that allowed them and made them willing to actually make costly sacrifices,
if need be, sometimes giving up income,
sometimes going to prison, possibly even losing their lives or their jobs,
in order to act in ways that would assist far distant others who could never reciprocate.
So for me, collaboration is not only about the cooperation between people who
know each other and have face-to-face or the potential of face-to-face interactions.
But my interest is really increasingly, I mean, I've studied that a lot,
but my interest really increasingly is how do you create collaboration across
distances and geographies and differences that are really much harder to surmount?
And if we want to answer and address and get some progress on dealing with things
like climate change or social justice,
really big issues that matter to us as a world, then we have to think about
collaboration in that much larger sense and not just in the ways in which small
group members interact with each other.
Even slightly larger, in Jenna's case, federated groups interact with each other.
So I'm even going beyond that and thinking about how do you create collaboration
with those you'd never meet, you wouldn't interact with, you're not part of
the same structure as in a federated system you are. Right.
But then what would you see as, let's say, the defining features of collaboration?
What are the necessary ingredients to be able to speak of a collaboration?
Well, Paul, I'm not sure I'll answer your question quite the way you mean it,
because I haven't been, unfortunately, part of this conversation,
so I may not understand collaboration the same way.
But as I said, what I really emphasize is institutions, both formal and informal.
So the rules of the game that govern a group, as well as the norms that govern the group.
So both the formal and informal institutions
are absolutely the critical ingredients to me of collaboration.
And the issue is that we know a lot about what those formal rules and norms
look like in a variety of settings,
but we don't know how to scale them or we have difficulty scaling them.
And so I think the really big, as I said,
my interest in collaboration is with those who you might never get to know,
can never reciprocate, but who you have to act in a cooperative way with and
about as if their interests are your interests,
because they are.
Yes. But how do you get people to recognize that is, for me, the crucial thing.
To recognize common interests and then to be able to act on those common interests.
Those are the two crucial ingredients for a collaboration.
Recognizing common interests and acting on common interests.
But now I could argue that that is like a facilitator of the collaboration.
Like, we might have a common interest, let's say, to contribute to the discussions in our forum.
But not collaborate in contributing to becoming a success because,
let's say, I go out for a run, even though I still share your interest, right?
And the same for institutions, I could argue, well, rules and norms are like mediums,
or procedures that shape the collaboration, but they don't generate the collaboration itself.
So would that be correct? So if so, then... Only partially, because what I hear
you asking is two different things.
And I said, I've not been part of the conversational collaboration.
So I had a suspicion that you meant something different than what I was talking about.
But Margaret... So part of what you're talking about are free riders.
And I do think the institutional rules can help with free riders, the norms and the rules.
The other part is actually giving your full contribution.
So it's one thing to keep somebody in the room and not have them go out for a run.
It's another thing to get their active participation and their full contributions
to the collective process.
And so it's hard for me to talk about that in the total abstract.
Can I resort to an example?
Because I really would like to go back to the unions that John Alquist and I
I studied and then talk a little bit about the problems of scaling that because
we really did observe, I think, what creates collaboration in your sense,
but then how to get that to a larger community because it was based on the fact
that people sort of knew each other who were collaborating even though they
were cooperating with people far distant than themselves.
So, Margaret, I know we're going to want to talk a lot about your experience with the unions. And,
So I want to pause for a moment and make sure we're all understanding,
as you think about collaboration,
how is that distinct from other
kinds of human interaction toward a common goal with a shared interest?
When you use the word collaboration, this is part of what we're interested in.
People have different definitions of it. So we want yours.
When you use the word collaboration, how does that define that activity from
other kinds of human interaction?
And if you want to describe it in that union context, that would be terrific.
Well, in all honesty, we never used the term collaboration.
It wasn't the term of art for us. We used the term cooperation,
you know, if there was a term to be used in that way.
Um so but i hear what paul
is asking about about this additional sort of
i think there's an additional ingredient beyond cooperation
which is simply everybody sort of contributes money or contributes time or is
in the same room and isn't free riding um so i do think there's another dimension
there and and if i think about our example i can see collaboration in that sense was created,
but not on the other end, not with the far-distant others who couldn't reciprocate.
They weren't collaborating.
They were receiving the effects of collaboration.
So I think it's a complicated question. One, you want to create a collaborative.
Process that gets people to engage in actions that they might not otherwise engage in.
But on the other hand, it's very hard, I think. I can't even imagine how to
create the collaboration on the other side.
I mean, I think that would be a very interesting thing to think about.
So let me get concrete because this is sounding very abstract.
So in our union case, which was the longshore workers on the west coast of the US and in Australia.
So we were looking at unions in the transport sector.
So we also had longshore workers on the East Coast of the US,
very different, very economistic, narrowly focused only on economic interest
and the teamsters of the US.
So those who drive trucks, longshore workers are, you know, what longshore workers are.
So they're the ones who load and unload ships.
Okay. So in these two Two unions of many that one could look at,
they were able to create this expanded community of fate where they saw beyond
their immediate members or their immediate interest as union members.
And several things created that.
One is they had a constitution.
When the unions were formed or reformed in the 1930s, they were formed around a constitution,
the leadership, the sort of Philadelphia moment, as we say in the U.S.,
the founding, created a constitution which was based on participatory democracy
and based on relatively easy recall of the leadership.
So there were a series of arrangements that were already put in place,
very different from the other unions, which were much more top-down.
Two, the unions recognized, the leadership recognized that if it was to achieve
anything, it had to be effective as union leaders, right?
So it was satisfying people's material needs.
The union had to do that. It had to get the improved wages, working conditions,
benefits that people join unions to get. I mean, that's what they get.
The other thing I should point out about these unions is that they were not,
you know, all the even though they were all white working class men,
they had very different political positions.
It was a very heterogeneous group in that sense.
Some were communists, some were very right wing, but they somehow managed to work together.
And how that happened was not just the participatory democracy,
but educational processes that existed in the union, both to socialize members,
but also for them to have means of learning about the world around them.
What it was really like to change their beliefs,
if you will, about what the world, how the world actually worked,
who was doing what to whom, and other parts of the world,
Which became very important when they were asked to stop loading ships that
were taking scrap iron to Japan because of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.
Taking it to China because of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in the 1930s
or the Australians refusing to load ships.
Indonesian ships, sorry, Dutch ships that were going to put down the uprising in Indonesia.
They had to know about those things, enough about them.
But equally important was that when any decision was made to engage in a costly
action, there was real debate and discussion about it and challenge of the information
that they were We're receiving.
So the leadership or whoever was initiating the action may say,
look, those ships are being loaded to go to Indonesia and they're going to put
down the rebels. And somebody would say, how do you know that?
They'd have to discuss it, and they'd have to provide sources,
and they'd have to convince each other of what the reality was,
so that when they decided to act, which they did by a vote,
so it wasn't just that the leadership told them that they did it,
most of them believed what it was that they were acting about,
and they believed it was unjust and unfair, and this was the last part.
They had some agency, so they could do something about it.
Now, whether they really I mean, I don't think the longshore workers stopped
the Dutch attack on the Indonesian rebels or stopped Japan from inhabiting Manchuria,
but they felt that they could act on their feelings about what was unjust here
and could do something for people that were distant from each other.
And part of what motivated that was the feeling and the belief,
if you will, that if it could happen to them, it could happen to us.
If you don't stand up now, then this could come back to haunt us later.
And we need to do this because someone else will have to help us when we do that.
Is this actually not an important defining feature, which is the idea of a common
goal? So there is a commons at stake, and actually also a common value in this case.
So isn't it a common goal to group together around achieving a common goal that
turns cooperation into collaboration?
Because for cooperation, this might be also more opportunistic,
right? We transiently work together, but we still pursue different goals,
but there is sort of an alignment in the sub-goals.
But when there's alignment on an overall, an overarching goal of the collective,
we start to speak of a collaboration. Would you agree with that?
Why not? I mean, I think that's, I mean, I think people are learning from each other.
It's more than simple cooperation, like we're all paying our taxes.
It's more than compliant cooperation.
I mean, there's an engagement here between the leadership and the members and
among the members themselves, which is an important ingredient in all of this, for sure.
However, you know, I'm not in your... Just a footnote, Margaret,
because I think, just a footnote, The enlightenment of our forum is still in the future.
So it's not that we're in any way representing some consensus view on anything.
We're really trying to find our way in the dark here, and we hope to figure
it out also in our dialogue with you.
Just to be clear about that. Got it. Okay, Jenna, go ahead. Margaret,
in your work with John Alquist, you use this phrase, and you've introduced it
already into our conversation, of community of fate.
F-A-T-E, let's be clear. F-A-T-E. F-A-T-E, fate.
And I think it would be wonderful if you could share with us why you chose that
particular phrase, rather than just say that they have a common interest.
Interest what is it about the phrase community of
fate that what is it
that you were observing in this collaborative process
that caused you to want to use that phrase as opposed to just they have they
share a common interest well actually the first time i used the term was in
an earlier paper with david olson um on uh the wto protests the protest against
the world trade organization in Seattle in 1999,
in which we both were involved with the longshore workers.
And what we saw there was some very interesting developments where groups were
coming together whose economic interests were divergent.
Some of the industries and some of the unions around the common goal,
if you will, of dealing with the environment.
So some of the workers who who were working for Kaiser and Kaiser, were coming together.
And that fascinated us. And what was driving that was a recognition that on
these larger set of questions,
their fates, their destinies were entwined, that there was a larger set of issues about the world.
Where there really was a common destiny that was at stake, which was beyond
their immediate economic interest of, you know, how do we distribute the profit?
What's the share between the company and the workers?
Right. That's one set of interests. But this was something that was even bigger
where they could recognize that they had to ally in some way.
Um, where, and, and what we saw at the, uh, protests were the people that were
the environmentalists and some of the unions coming together around these kinds
of common issues, as well as some of the unions working with some of the companies.
So we reintroduced that term, uh, John Alquist and I, when we started looking
at these questions, because again, we were looking at, so there are lots of
questions you could study about unions and we weren't studying the question, which many have.
And done well, on under what conditions can you create collective action and
therefore an effective union around winning wages, working conditions,
and benefits from the employer.
That's one kind of common interest.
We were looking for things where there really was this larger sense of entwined
destinies around big questions.
Jenna is involved with a program at the Center for Advanced Study on the Moral Political Economy.
And you can see how these ideas become the moral political economy idea because
it really is about these big, socially significant questions and how we create,
whether we call it cooperation or collaboration.
Around these larger issues.
So I often exhort Martin Luther King talking about exhorting us to wrap ourselves
in a single garment of destiny around social justice issues.
And it's really that kind of question where we're coming above the common interest
where we could create a collective action process to really think about these
larger sets of questions and how that could be achieved.
But now if you speak of a community of faith, which is extremely interesting, thing.
Still, from a prospective point of view, fate might look very different as from
a retrospective point of view.
In a retrospective point of view, you have seen the convergence,
you know the endpoint, and you can interpret what came before as some complex
self-organizing process.
But once that self-organizing process is still running, it might be actually
more difficult to predict what it will converge towards, right?
So in that sense, isn't the community of fate creating an interpretational risk?
Is this by necessity a retrospective point of view?
Yeah, I think there's always a risk. I mean, you could get you could get it badly wrong.
I mean, community of fate, as I mentioned, is, you know, we don't want to create fascism.
Um so we've increasingly called
it an expanded and inclusive community of
fate in order to sort of speak beyond
the kinds of communities of fate that we
all have with our families or with certain
others and we're not you know they're that a community
of faith can be negative or positive i mean so our interest is in creating one
that has the potential we believe you know Where we're really thinking about
issues where all of us as humans are engaged and could be hurt or could be affected,
even if not everybody recognizes that, like climate change.
Right. Now, earlier you mentioned key features, which are psychological features,
such as to reciprocate or to share interests or to recognize the interests of others.
So in some sense, we start to look also at the psychological side of collaboration.
So what would you see as the key psychological processes that make collaborations happen?
Well, I want to parse that question a little bit because some of it is psychological,
but some of it is informational, and some of it is just understanding,
reaching a common understanding about facts.
And I think that in our current world, that's a crucial thing to do.
And I think the mechanism for that, which may have a psychological piece to it,
is really allowing challenge and discussion in a relatively civil way and structuring
that so we can hear each other and we can hear what people's objections are
to a particular set of truths or facts or interpretations of the world.
The psychological piece of it really has to do with, I think, a couple of things.
One is establishing enough competence among the group that is trying to collaborate,
trust, if you will, among the various members.
So you have confidence, one, that you trust them to be telling you as close
to the truth as they understand it.
Always room for debate and challenge. Two, that there will be some civility in the process.
And three, that if you lose, you have a chance to win in the future,
that it's not all set up against you.
And that's both institutionally protected, but that also depends on the people
who are engaged that they're not going to try to take advantage of the situation um in that regard,
okay so those are things that are internal to the group in a sense the other
thing that i think is really crucial here and i often um cite elizabeth wood here is about uh.
The passion and the emotion that comes from feeling effective,
that there is a real emotional benefit from feeling that you can act on what
you think is the right thing to do.
And we see that in all kinds of social movements as well as all kinds of actions,
that people need to feel like they can act and that that's a crucial part of
trying to achieve a goal and getting them to move beyond their immediate self-interest.
So, but would you then, are you suggesting that there is also an intrinsic motivation
to collaborate beyond self-interest?
Absolutely. But that doesn't necessarily, people don't necessarily know how
to access that intrinsic motivation.
So I think the structure helps to create a setting in which it's comfortable
to, you You know, if you feel like you're going to be, you don't want to be,
you don't want to have people free riding around you.
You don't want to be treated like the weird one.
You know, so you need to feel comfortable to express your intrinsic motivation
within a group like a union, which is focused or a country,
which is focused on the economic self-interest and well-being of its members
and not necessarily on evoking those intrinsic motivations.
So a lot of my work has been on intrinsic motivation and on how to,
so probably my best known piece of work is A Rule in Revenue,
which talks about how citizens,
how the state evokes from citizens compliance with extractive taxes and why
different kinds of tax systems develop over time.
What I learned from that book is a crucial part of the story was really about states,
but I really learned that a crucial part of that story was motivating citizens
to want to contribute to government and then putting them in situations where willing compliance.
Was a good thing to do and not a stupid thing to do,
so that their ethical motivation or intrinsic motivation or whatever you want
to call it, but I think it's also an ethical commitment was allowed to be an
important part of and a recognized and rewarded,
in some sense, part of their behavior.
I then went on to study the way in, because the tax thing, I could only look
really from the state's perspective, because it's hard to know who's really
complying and who's not.
So I then went on to look in consent, dissent, and patriotism at military service
and the conditions under which citizens did actually,
actually comply with extractive demands of government, like volunteering or
being conscripted into military service, where you're going to pay a very high cost for it.
And it became, you know, and I was trying to show or understand the conditions
under which it was simply a question of coercion or material benefits,
as we know is true in some voluntary military circumstances,
circumstances and even in conscripted ones.
And when it was a commitment to the collective good and yes,
I'm willing to sacrifice myself because we'll be protecting the country or whatever.
As I wrote in the foreword to that book, I just have to say this.
My father willingly served in one war and my husband refused to serve in a different war.
And both of them are among the most ethical and moral people that I know.
Right. But that's also an interesting example
because in some sense there
if you want willing compliance got shaped
into opposite decisions correct
right and so so how do you explain that well because it is a relationship between
government and citizens and if citizens believe that the war is just the common
the goal the entwined destiny is at stake.
That's one thing. If they think it's violating that, that's another thing.
So I think that context really matters in these cases. You could not get the
longshore workers to close the ports for absolutely anything.
I mean, it had to be something they were convinced that there was an actual
community of fate involved, that it really mattered to the world.
But now we see two processes, right? So on the one hand, there is an individual
process of intrinsic motivation, of a willing compliance to also,
if you want, identify with the collective and pursue,
if you want, a common good, however that is defined by the government.
But in parallel to that, we have institutions and rule that also try to shape
that individual process.
And in some sense, if you want, these institutional mechanisms are also put
in place to, if you want, shape the collective,
to make the collective move in a certain direction that, if you want,
the nation state might choose as being a priority.
But to what extent do you see these processes as competitive or even conflicting?
Well, I think they can be both.
So one of the things in the book on military service that I saw and documented
had to do with conscientious objectors.
So when the costs of being a conscientious objector are extremely high,
which is an institutional decision, you see a lot fewer of them,
no matter, even if you see the same ethical distribution in the society.
So for example, in the, just to take the US, well, I'll take France as an example.
In World War I, I believe I found one.
Conscientious objector. It's not that French aren't moral or ethical or aren't
concerned about war, and it isn't that there wasn't a strong left wing that
was arguing that this was a capitalist war, et cetera, et cetera.
But the cost of being a conscientious objector were unbelievably high.
I mean, that person wrote a book, right? Because he was in prison for almost
almost his whole life until he was finally let out at some point.
As the rules changed, you saw more conscientious objectors, and who were seriously
conscientious objectors.
So I think the institutions shape in two different ways.
One is they affect the cost of certain kinds of behaviors.
You can see that with the unions. You can see that with governments,
as I'm giving in this example.
The other way they shape it is, as I said, with both information and with education.
So getting people aware of the world, getting people aware of the social injustices
that exist in the world, framing those.
I mean, I think the unions that I studied that were, and one of the reasons
I admire them so much is they really, it was not a top-down imposition.
It was shaped, but people really argued about that and what they thought was
worth making sacrifices about varied over time as the group changed.
And it wasn't just leadership didn't always get its way on this.
And sometimes things were bottom up.
Now, our governments tend to be more top down, and that's often been a problem.
And don't really allow, I mean, think about the Iraq war in the United States.
We were given terrible information. Right.
And then people thought they had to act.
They thought that was the world. So not allowing a challenge of that information is also shaping.
I thought Jenna was about to jump in there. It was.
So this is so interesting, as you know.
So how is it that, so we're talking about institutions as things that shape
incentives and also the information that's flowing, but you also said that people
need to be in a position where they believe the information.
And part of believing that information, and this is, I'm inviting you to tie
together the extrinsic motivation with the intrinsic in the sense that you need
to believe not the information guiding your action,
your own action, but also that others are going to be in the same place, right?
So there is this sort of social element to it getting us back to the community of faith.
So the question is, what role do institutions play in building that community of fate.
Well, that's where the scaling is hard for me because I can see how the unions did it.
First of all, people were members of this organization because they had common economic interest.
So there was already a commitment to cooperate with each other around those
common economic interests.
So that gives them a baseline of confidence in each other, trust in each other,
working together with each other. Also, the work, at least in the 1930s before
the containers came in, required cooperation.
So there were multiple, and there were water coolers, and they have a hiring hall.
I mean, there were all kinds of things that enabled the workers to engage with
each other and to learn enough about each other to feel somewhat comfortable
with each other and with their leadership who was not distant from them.
That's harder to achieve in government
and that's part of what the institution did was
to shape those all of those were
institutions the hiring halls an institution the you know the bargaining is
an institution the relationship between the governed and the governed is an
institution in my terminology so all of those things were there and shaping
it and we can pay attention to those and think about how to scale that.
The piece that I can't figure out how to scale is this social connective tissue
that comes from being part of this other common enterprise and interacting with each other.
I mean, the longshore union in most parts of the West Coast has refused to allow
cell phones to be used instead of coming to the hiring hall.
To get your assignments because they want people to know each other.
They see that as part of the glue there.
Well, we're living in a world where that's going to become harder and harder to do.
So we really do have to find other ways of creating connective tissue.
And that connective tissue then helps people
come to at least listen to each other about
the information that's being provided and about their disparate
views about that information and encourages them
to engage with each other until they reach some kind
of you know one persuades the other or they see
a third way they're about what's actually going
on in the world julia all of
information is very important because just as you say they're they're not allowing
um hiring via by a telephone they want people in the hall itself to engage with
each other the role of information be it on social media,
et cetera, et cetera, is going to have to affect the participatory process by
which they make their decisions, by which they decide what is important,
not only from the pragmatic point of view for their own material gain,
but in this global identity of what you gave the example of the Dutch and the Indonesians.
How is that going to be, or how is it managed today with information, information flow and.
Yeah, I can't really fully answer that.
I mean, I could for the unions, I guess, but for the society as a whole,
except that one of the great, we focus a lot now, as we should,
on the problems that social media is creating.
But there are also some great advantages that social media is creating.
It does make information much more accessible.
What we haven't figured out is the right ways to curate that and manage it so
that we're actually encouraging this kind of civil debate and challenge.
Challenge i mean there are a lot of as as we all
know there are a lot of people working on that problem right now
and we have to find a solution to it
because that is going to be a major source of information for a
lot of us and we all deal with in the classroom like it drove me crazy when
a student would come up and say i don't believe what you're saying because i
found on this website which is some weird you know some piece of information
that was totally wrong and then And I would try to get them to look back to
see where that information came from.
But, you know, hopefully we're past that now. That was 10 years ago.
But we still have those problems.
Oh, yeah. But I feel there is something hidden in the point where we are in
the discussion that has not been sufficiently articulated.
Articulated, because we speak about institutions and about also the structuring
role of institutions in the end as an information architecture, if you want.
This is actually what we're implicitly talking about. But then we jump to very
concrete implementation examples, no telephones in the hiring hall.
But that's not really defining the protocols and the representational formats
of information that actually is then supporting and shaping this complex collaborative process.
So, for instance, that means indeed a union has rules and these rules you have
to just obey in order to be a member.
As a member, you have certain incentives that it actually is to your benefit to be a member.
So these are all elements of an informational architecture that makes that union
effective in allowing people to collaborate in that context.
But I'm not sure we have articulated that sufficiently from the perspective
of the institutions that you really put in the foreground of shaping collaboration.
So what do you see as the key protocols for organizations and also governments in that sense?
Well, as I said, I thought, but let me reemphasize. I'm just slow.
Don't worry about it. No, no, no.
I just said I was throwing a lot of stuff at you and you're asking it in a slightly
different way. So, you know, what is really crucial to these unions that has
to do with the information flow that we're talking about are a couple of things.
One is that they have all kinds of educational processes and socialization processes
within the union, and they're not necessarily required. There were all kinds
of, you know, some of it comes from what's in the union newspaper.
Who knows if everybody reads it? I doubt it, but a lot do.
Some of it comes from various kinds of schools that they provide,
which people can choose to be in or not.
Some of it comes from, I don't, the Australian dock workers had a film unit that.
Which they produced all kinds of material, which told the history of the union
about certain struggles and ultimately about the world around them.
There are various mechanisms of educating people and trying to figure out how
they hear stuff and how they learn and what's attractive to them.
It's not making it required. It's making it available in an attractive form
so that people want to consume that kind of information.
And then the other critical piece of it was this debate, that it is really a
deliberative process and people are challenging each other about the information that they have.
And I think that's a critical piece of it.
We really do come to these questions with different sources of information that's been made even,
that's even stronger now than it was in the 1930s through 80s or 90s or whenever
social media became so big, right?
But in your example of the French conscientious objector in the First World
War, that was not the case of education and joining in the education program or not.
That was also very strongly directed top-down propaganda to create a common
national identity and objective, for which it was very difficult to escape, I would assume.
That's why, Anita, you only found one example. No, it wasn't.
It wasn't. It wasn't difficult to escape at all.
There were so many debates during World War One. I mean, Rosa Luxemburg ended
up in the canal after World War One. I mean, because they had in the Germans,
as you know, had been arguing about World War One.
That was true in the Western, you know, in the other countries as well that
were engaged in that struggle.
There were debates going on. But there were rules that government had.
So let's separate out the incentive rules from the informational process.
The incentives of governments were very tough on conscientious objectors.
They did not accept that as a reasonable reaction to citizens.
That took a campaign to change that.
And it changed in all of the countries. All of the
countries that were engaged in World War I ultimately changed
their rules about conscientious objection and made it a little easier for people
who were of a dissenting religion and ultimately people who just really hated
a war to try to become conscientious objectors.
So you know the the the the difficulty of becoming a conscientious objector
had nothing to was not the informational structure architecture it had to do
with rules that punished people who were,
conscientious objectors the informational structure you know.
Is a different problem. And that is really,
it's hard to figure out how to do that with a country with multiple sources
or a world with multiple sources of information coming at us and no deliberative,
no adequate deliberative forums to challenge that information and to allow those
alternative perspectives to come through.
I mean, in principle, parliaments and legislatures are supposed to do that.
But we've seen them failing at that tremendously from, let's take World War I on.
Well before that, but World War I on.
I understand. Can I follow up on this? So I'm hearing two things.
On the one hand, in building the community of faith, information plays a role
in coming to a shared understanding.
And so we would want to highlight elements of the institutional structure that
would build common knowledge.
That is not just the personal receipt of information, but witnessing the receipt
by others and their agreement.
So you have a shared understanding. And then on the other hand,
you're talking right now about the importance of divergent perspectives.
So, to what extent do divergent perspectives, does diversity play a role in
helping to build a community of faith?
Yeah, I'm not sure I've thought that well enough through to give a very good
response, Jenna. I think it's a really important question.
And certainly, I'm thinking about, so even though the unions that we studied
were heterogeneous politically, The members were not so different from each other.
There were fisticuffs at times, just as there have been in other settings,
but they were also bound by the cooperation around winning good contracts. Right.
So there was already a baseline there. What happens when there isn't a baseline,
but there is a lot of diversity and divergence of views?
And how do you bring that together in a way that really, I mean,
I think it was incredibly important, even in the union setting,
that there was diversity of views, that not everybody felt exactly the same way.
Um but where they agreed was on some fundamental principles which i think we
could so maybe this is a way to
get at it i'm not sure i'm i'm talking trying to figure it out as i go um.
That there were some fundamental principles that were appealed to.
You know, is there something big at stake here that really trans goes above our differences?
That was one. Two, is what's being done fair? Is it just?
And do we all agree that it isn't?
I think those two things really were what ultimately people relied on to make a decision.
So, the kind of information they needed was,
you know, they weren't debating over whether this particular piece of the infrastructure
bill would actually work or would cost too much or, I mean, it wasn't at that level.
It was really, is this really an instance of injustice?
And is this really something that matters to the world, that you better take
a stand here because, God forbid, it could happen to us?
But now, Margaret, I also feel that regularly you're pushing towards this current
challenge you look at of scaling, right?
How do we scale it in a more complex, large-scale form of collaboration?
But before we get there, maybe it's also relevant to really understand why the
kinds of collaborations that we know today, as your union example,
under what conditions would they fail?
Do we know that? Do we know the limiters in that process that are really the
critical nodes in the process that can disrupt it?
So sorry paul i i that so where the unions would fail or where the larger well
as an example you could take the union but just collaboration as such where
are the brittle the brittle breaking points.
When does it fail? I think there are a couple of brittle breaking points.
And this is just, you know, even thinking about the union example.
One is that the one is the Constitution could change.
So leadership could decide to be more authoritarian, less participatory.
I mean, that happens. That happens in governments, says a member,
a citizen of the United States.
Um, so we know that that's a real danger,
uh, no matter how you set up the constitution that people, that there can be
leaders and cadres that are counter the norms that we thought we had established
about what, how you govern,
um, and are fundamentally changing the constitution.
So that's a, that's a brittle, that's a place of brittleness.
Another is we've been talking about really,
which has to do with the information and how we actually create a process where
people can come to share some common views about what reality is and what truth
is and what's really going on in the world.
And that's proved to be very difficult in this current world because of the
multiple sources of information and the ways in which people create echo chambers
and other kinds of things.
Always been a problem, I don't want to say, and it's always been a point of
tension in creating collaboration.
But it's gotten, if anything, worse. And if we don't solve that one, it's going to eat us.
I think another point of brittleness is that for collaboration to work,
I think you have to feel that it's that your engagement with each other can
actually lead to an action that could could possibly make a difference.
And I think that's another thing that is very hard to achieve in our world.
In all worlds. i mean the
the lab you know we discussed we didn't study the longshore
workers because they had an effective way to
act but that became apparent that actually all of these transport workers have
a way of stopping trade they can just stop it and that gives them a kind of
an effectiveness um or a sense of effectiveness and efficacy that uh,
you know, lots of people don't have. So finding those ways for people to be
feel efficacious, I think is another place where we really have to think hard
and it can be a brittle place and place of fragility.
Right. But now in scaling.
So I feel a tension in, in the way you described the two processes,
because in the, can I add one more? I just, sorry.
And then come back, Which goes back to Jenna's point about diversity.
I think that divergent views can be both healthy and unhealthy.
And what's happening, we have not figured out mechanisms for turning those divergent,
extremely held views often, and often for good reasons.
I mean, we had an argument the other day, I think Jenna might have been there,
at lunch with one of our fellows who wanted to frame racial and the racial structure
issues as white supremacy. Supremacy.
And I took exception to that because I was willing to admit I was a racist in
the United States because we all are because of the nature of the racial structure.
But white supremacist had a whole nother meaning to me.
And it wasn't clear she and I, though we were very civil and friendly,
we're going to ever come to an agreement about this.
Now, that was a divergence that I think could be productive,
but it also could be, you know, it just could block us from talking. Yeah, exactly.
So, you know, how to deal with those things, I don't think we have good,
I mean, there are really good reasons why people have those divergent views,
is what I was trying to say.
I think you gave the answer to that earlier by saying, well,
there's actually two parallel structures. There's an information process,
and there's an incentive process.
And the incentive process can also be used to then shape.
The collaboration information process, because it starts to put boundaries.
It starts to move the collective in one direction or the other.
Would that not be the way to solve these kinds of conflicts by saying action?
No, because I don't think so, because I think what we're confronting… So,
here's a big difference between the unions and a society.
The unions, you know, have… One, they have the same basic social class,
the members, They're fighting for the same economic things.
They have a mechanism to do that.
When we're looking at a society, we have people with different social classes,
different levels of poverty, different life experiences,
which are really, those are really hard boundaries, particularly where in a
country like the United States and maybe increasingly in Germany too,
I just don't know the data, people are geographically segregated.
They know what their neighbors are like. Like they don't really understand,
you know, the kinds of conditions that other people are living in,
whether they be coal miners in Appalachia or poor blacks in Chicago.
Earlier, you said you made a statement in this participatory process discussion.
If it could happen to them, it could happen to us, meaning these unions were
interested in making decisions that would reinforce the well-being of other
people because they could see a connection,
even long distance over to wherever across the world, they could see a connection to these people.
Looking at the situation you've just portrayed with how to manage diverging
views is one of the problems that we have a problem with understanding identity,
meaning whether it is of us as an individual versus the collective,
us as a regional person within a context of a region versus in a global context.
Is the information flow or the divergent views, is that standing in this way
of connecting to other people in this identity that you mentioned earlier?
That's obtuse. I can see it in your eyes. No, no, I'm trying to think it through.
It's not obtuse at all, Julia. I'm just trying to think it through because,
you know, talking about it in the union setting is so different because you can.
So, one of the things that the
longshore workers were able to do was to overcome these racial divides.
Minds um and it
was in part because some of the white leadership in
the unions would say like harry
bridges who was the president of the longshore workers in the west coast u.s
said you know if if they're only two after containerization if there are only
two workers left working for loading and unloading ships, one of them will be Black.
And the leadership of the union refused to put into trusteeship,
believe it or not, Portland, which you think of as a liberal city because of
its racist practices within the union and its refusal to hire Black workers.
So they showed in a variety of ways, and the Black workers really appreciate
it, They showed in a variety of ways their commitment to racial justice,
and the president of the union right now is black.
I mean, so it continues, and their constitution continues.
In Australia, the leadership there has made that kind of commitment to Aborigines,
which was unheard of, as well as to Asians, which if we're thinking the 1930s
and 1940s, you can just imagine how extreme that was.
So in those kinds of situations with those kinds of arrangements and where you're
seeing actual workers who are affected by this on both sides and where you're
having to deal with those so that's where there was not clearly homogeneity
in the views there were some very racist workers,
and there were people with very different views so they managed to pull it together
because of strong leadership, strong membership commitment, for the most part,
willingness to go along with this or even encouraging it, this kind of racial
integration and understanding and engagement.
It's harder to figure out how to do that, as I said, in a country,
because this somewhat depends, it depends on a quality of leadership,
something we haven't really addressed, but which I think is quite important
in creating cooperative and even and collaborative arrangements and different
mechanisms of leadership, but the quality of leadership matters and its commitments.
And that's been a problem. But we also have,
no means of getting people to really confront each other's differences in a
way that can lead to a constructive outcome.
Seems to lead to hatred and riots and reactive politics or overly, you know.
Noblesse oblige politics, which is equally bad in some ways,
maybe better, but also has a problem.
And then when we're talking about, at a global scale, building a global community
of fate to manage our two huge crises, the pandemic and climate change.
So let me ask you this, Margaret, what hope do you see for that?
Well, you know, I hope that during the pandemic, a community of fate would develop.
And here's why I did emphasize leadership in part.
Because if you have leadership that undermines that, as we did in the United
States and happened in Britain and some other countries, not in Germany so much,
it really undermines the community of faith.
Because what our leadership was doing, as we all know, was creating divides
rather than commonalities. So we weren't all in it together.
Different groups were in it in different ways and have different,
the differences in interests were emphasized rather than the difference in,
you know, a common and entwined destiny.
So leadership can matter there. So that was very disappointing.
And I think we're still suffering. I know we are still suffering the consequences
of a series of very problematic actions by not just our president,
but by other political leaders as well in this country and in other countries.
Um the climate crisis i'm a little more am i optimistic or pessimistic i am hopeful.
That we can find a way and
i i certainly see it happening with the young people so
hopefully they can get us us older guys to act fast enough to save them um so
i think there's There's an intergenerational expanded community of faith that
we really need to keep in mind that you're working for your grandchildren, not just for yourself.
And I think that's where the hope is, to try to create that understanding that our world.
Is about the future, not just about whatever present injustices there are.
So, I think that's the other fillip to the expanded and inclusive community
of faith that we have to really think through.
But, you know, looking at the
young people, I am somewhat optimistic that somehow this will be solved.
We may all have to get out of the way, but that's okay with me.
I'm ready to do that i'm ready for the next generation to try to move this forward
but margaret what i before we really go to the finish line there's in your analysis
i feel there are two opposing.
Models of of the human agent involved and i cannot reconcile the two so maybe
maybe you can help me with that because on the one hand or not early on early
on you you were very firm about saying that institutions with their rules and
norms are shapers of the process of collaboration.
And if that is true, that is also more a behaviorist perspective on how human
behavior can be formed through external incentives and information, right?
Then the intrinsic features of the human agent doesn't really matter.
But on the other hand, you also put a lot of weight on this notion of discussion, debate,
interaction, which is more an enlightenment-informed view on how human progress might be instilled.
But I cannot see how I can bring these two together.
I need to clarify something because, one, I don't think institutions totally shape behavior.
I'm not at all arguing that. I would never argue that. But they make it easier
to act in some ways than other ways.
And they make it easier or harder to act on your intrinsic motivations and your ethical commitments.
So one of the things that I have argued for a long time is that to evoke willing compliance.
Or quasi-voluntary compliance with extractive demands of government requires
not only some kind of promise-keeping and contract,
if you will, between the government and the citizens And that is shown to be actually operating.
I mean, that there's actually delivery by the government on its side of the
bargain, but that there is also, and therefore some trust and confidence in
the institutional arrangements,
but that also there is confidence that government will punish the free riders.
So, that makes it easier for me to act on my commitments,
my ethical commitments, if I know that those who will be trying to take advantage
of me will be likely caught and punished and restrained from engaging in that.
I mean, you know, it's much then it makes it much easier for me to act on my ethical commitment.
So I see institutions not so much as shaping as enabling or blocking,
which is a little bit different than shaping. Okay, clear.
And I do think that they make it possible for certain kinds of norms to arise
within an organization, a government.
A larger polity maybe, that are shaping.
I mean, I think the norms are shaping because they come from a social set of
interactions among people, not just a top-down set of rules telling people to
walk this way or not walk that way.
So I'm not just talking about institutions that tell us to drive on the right
or the left side of the road. Those do shape our behavior, yes.
And that's very very behaviorist, but for very good reasons.
But we don't really have commitments one way or the other there.
I mean, that's just helping to regulate the way the society,
making sure that we don't bump into each other with our cars and kill each other.
Very different kind of thing, that kind of institution than the ones I'm talking about.
Sure. But in the meantime, with your own example, I could also say,
look, look, Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, and that's terrible.
And everybody believes that. And with that, you've shaped their behavior to
support a certain course of action.
But that's the information flow, not the institutions, right?
So you were talking about the, I'm not seeing a total conflict between the two.
I mean, what I see as what humans are is that all of us have some self-interest.
That's self-preserving.
That often involves our children, not just ourselves, but it's still self-preserving.
And all of us have some ethical commitments and some passions and other things
that we care intensely about, which will be enabled or disabled.
And some of those we want to disable some of the really nasty things.
I mean, we don't want young men running around with guns, shooting others because
they decide they don't like their tattoos or their politics or their color.
Following up on that, last question,
Margaret, unless Jenna or Julia still want to bring something up.
If you had the ability to change one thing in humans to make them more effective
in collaborating and solving these crises that are right in front of us,
What would this one thing be that you would change?
I don't think I can change anything in humans, frankly. I think we have to learn
what humans are like and create arrangements that enable them to be the best
of themselves rather than the worst of themselves.
All right, Margaret Levy, thank you very much for this conversation.
You're very welcome. It was enlightening to me. Now I know a lot more about you.
Hi, you listened to one of our podcasts in the series on collaboration produced
by the Ernst Trommel Forum and the Convergent Science Network.
You can find more episodes on our website.