Episode Summary
Nichola Raihani reading from Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and discussing achieving cooperation through competition.
I’m seven, playing cricket in my backyard in Canberra. I’m batting, my seventy-year-old grandmother is bowling, and I hit an amazing shot. Granny, the most competitive person I have ever met, hurls herself sideways and plucks an amazing catch inches from the ground; I utterly lose my mind. I throw the bat, I cry, I stomp off the field, and I lock myself in my room. Turns out, I was as competitive as my grandmother … and I wasn’t much of a gracious loser.
Nichola Raihani is a fan of cooperation and has much to say about its relationship with competition in our everyday lives. Nichola is a Professor of Evolution and Behaviour and a Royal Society University Research Fellow at University College London, and the author of the newly released book, The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World.
Nichola reads two pages from ‘On the Origin of Species’ by Charles Darwin. [reading begins at 25:10]
Hear us discuss:
- Cooperation and competition: “Cooperation is ultimately a form of competition.” [5:36]
- Engineering and increasing cooperation. [32:35]
- How punishment impacts cooperation: “The threat of punishment can be quite effective to induce cooperation, but when it is actually executed, it can cause cooperation to completely unravel.” [38:00]
- “A lot of the time, the reason people are cooperative is because it feels really good to help other people.” [46:41]
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Resources:
Nichola Raihani | Twitter
Nichola Raihani’s book | The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World
Charles Darwin | On the Origin of Species
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