Joshua Greene

Gallen in Switzerland, where people right off the bat put lots of money in and cooperation stayed high.

And as a result, people pulled out, made a lot of money.

There are other places like Chengdu in China and Melbourne, Australia, where people

put in sort of mid-levels to begin with, but then people could punish people who did not play the way that they liked.

And the people who didn't put enough in got punished.

And by the end, it looks just like Copenhagen with people putting in lots of money.

And then there were other places, including say Athens, Greece, which, you know, in many ways, the cradle of Western civilization.

where cooperation levels were low at the beginning and they stayed low throughout.

And the research was like, well, what's going on in Athens?

Where's the wisdom of Socrates here?

And what they found was that some people were punishing, who didn't put money in the pool, were punishing the people who did put money in.

and uh and this is a sort of strange thing they call this anti-social punishment and they ask people why are you doing this and it was a kind of rejection of the setup right that and it has to do with with with people's circle of comfort so it's not that people in athens in in 20 to you know 2006 or whenever this was done are not nice people they're not cooperative people but it is

a more closed culture, where the way you end up having a relationship with somebody is you're introduced, this is my friend, this is my friend's cousin, my cousin's friend, right?

And the idea of going to a room with a bunch of strangers, that may work well in Switzerland, but in Athens, it's too antiseptic.

It doesn't feel like, it feels like it's being forced on them.

And as a result, in that weird context, they came out behind.

But if there was, let's say, some crisis in the community, that might be a more densely interconnected community where those people would be more willing to help each other out in an emergency than perhaps in other places.

And so what you need to figure out is how can you get people to take the next step?

And this has been the theme of the two main sort of public facing projects.

that I've been working on, which I won't go into great detail now, but just sort of mention them and plant some seeds.