Joshua Greene

And individuals cooperate with each other in small groups, in tribes, in chiefdoms, in nations, occasionally in United Nations.

Every level, from molecules up to nations in the UN, it's about parts coming together that can accomplish more together than they can accomplish separately, and that's why they work.

Now, it's not all like unicorns and rainbows, that the units are competing with each other at each level.

So it's cooperation and competition at increasing levels of complexity.

That, in a nutshell, is the story of life on Earth.

And so, from a biological point of view, the way to bring people together is to have them be on the same team.

Social scientists, and I'm partly a social scientist in addition to being a philosopher, reached the same conclusion.

And this goes back to Gordon Alport, who sat in the building that I sit in now in the 1950s and developed what's called the contact hypothesis, which is the idea that if you want to break down barriers between races, between people of different religions, they need to

be in touch with each other, and it needs to be in a cooperative sort of way.

That's not exactly how he put it.

His contemporaries, Sharif and Sharif, explicitly talked about kids at a summer camp who were either put on separate teams and made to fight with each other, or they had to team up to pull the truck out of the mud, and came to the same conclusion there, sort of compatible with this idea.

So I was like, okay, if the biologists and the social scientists have all known that cooperation, teamwork, like this is the heart of it, why haven't we solved this yet?

And there have been lots of

historical cases where this point has been made.

So when people were first, in World War II, were first talking about integrating the US military, a lot of people, you will never get white people and black people to fight in the same unit.

And they had people making these dire predictions of like people turning on each other in the ranks, right?

And instead what they found was that these integrated units worked great.

And it really changed people's racial attitudes.

Because when you put people on the same team and their lives are at stake and there's a job to get done, they not only do the job, but they become like brothers, right?

Or sisters, as the case may be.