Real cooperation runs on mixed motivations that can undermine one another

Evidence

In a modern state, people are motivated by some version or degree of each of the sorts of motivations that have been distinguished, and their actions are often overdetermined, quite often by all four. The right question to ask, at this level of generality, is not which of these simple models could be made to do all the work, but rather what combinations of such motivations make sense. How are they disposed to undermine one another? It will be particularly important here to ask what kinds of non-egoistic micro-motivation there are, and which of them might relate coherently (more coherently than national-level thick trust could) to both the egoistic micro-motivations and the large impersonal structures of a modern state. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 231

Categorization

Category: Connection Points

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s Luhmann/Hardin synthesis: in Saramago, blindness collapses the observability that lets mixed motivations align, so egoism overwhelms the rest.

Related

• Cooperation requires knowing others’ motives and being believed trustworthy (similarity 0.85)
• Egoistic micro-motivation lacks momentum across cases of cooperation (similarity 0.83)
• Asking which single motive explains cooperation is the wrong question. (similarity 0.83)
• Pure moral commitment to cooperate is unstable without egoistic reinforcement (similarity 0.83)
• Strategies to minimize reliance on trust have been conflated with neglecting to understand it. (similarity 0.82)
• Mutually beneficial cooperation often fails to arise among rational individuals (similarity 0.82)
• Real actions are overdetermined by multiple motivation types that can undermine each other. (similarity 0.82)
• Cooperation has no general solution, only historically specific ones (similarity 0.81)
• Cooperation collapses if no one will knowingly take the dependent role. (similarity 0.81)
• Cooperative concert can emerge even amid the maximal distrust of war. (similarity 0.81)
• Cooperation has no single solution; motivations combine and overdetermine action (similarity 0.81)
• Egoistic micro-motivation can sustain cooperation via self-interest without any general cooperative disposition. (similarity 0.80)
• Social cooperation rests on expectations about others’ conduct, not on language (similarity 0.80)
• Cooperation requires common knowledge of mutual preferences, not just shared preferences (similarity 0.80)
• Cooperative dispositions are conditional and degrade beyond a cost threshold. (similarity 0.80)