Designing the Commons

David Sloan Wilson and his collaborators use multilevel selection theory and Elinor Ostrom's core design principles to study what lets groups cooperate. In Binghamton, New York, they mapped prosociality (behavior that benefits others), helped residents design parks, and tested a school for at-risk teenagers in a randomized trial. ProSocial World now trains groups to apply the design principles.

Groups often fail because what benefits one member can harm the group. The ecologist Garrett Hardin called this the tragedy of the commons: when a resource is open to everyone, each user has a reason to take more, and the resource is used up. Wilson explains why with multilevel selection theory: within a group, selfish members tend to beat cooperative ones, even though groups of cooperators beat selfish groups.

Elinor Ostrom, who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics, showed that groups can manage shared resources themselves, at least when certain conditions are met. Her cases included communities in Switzerland, Japan and the Philippines that had governed meadows, forests and irrigation water for generations. She identified eight design principles that broadly set the successful groups apart from those that failed.

Applying the principles to other groups

In 2013 Wilson, Ostrom and Michael Cox argued that the principles follow from the way cooperation evolves, and therefore apply to most human groups. Groups of close relatives or proven friends, and groups facing an emergency, often need fewer of them. ProSocial World states the eight principles this way:

In 2006 Wilson and colleagues started the Binghamton Neighborhood Project to study prosociality across a small, economically depressed city. They planned to repeat a survey every three years, map the results by neighborhood, and test controlled interventions to increase prosociality.

Mapping prosociality

In 2010 the Binghamton City School District opened the Regents Academy for 9th and 10th graders who had failed at least three of five courses the year before. Raising such students' performance often calls for a longer school day, a longer year and other expensive measures. The Academy kept the normal day and year, and cost slightly more per student than the regular high school.

A school designed for cooperation and learning

Wilson and his graduate student Richard Kauffman Jr. designed the Academy's social environment with its principal, Miriam Purdy, and four teachers. They drew on Ostrom's principles, on research into how young people adapt to harsh environments, and on learning theory. The Academy had its own staff and location, and its design included:

Wilson later wrote that he and Kauffman withdrew from the Regents Academy when they judged it no longer had the autonomy to govern its own affairs. It closed the following year. Wilson calls this an example of “the paradox of programs that work but don’t survive or spread”: even a program that works can be undone by the next school superintendent, mayor or dean.

In 2019, Wilson, Atkins and the psychologist Steven C. Hayes set out the ProSocial Process in their book Prosocial. The process pairs the core design principles with tools from acceptance and commitment therapy, such as the ACT Matrix. ProSocial World says these tools help "balance mindfulness with purposeful action."

In the Regents Academy paper, Wilson and his co-authors call humans "facultative cooperators", whose cooperation depends on circumstances. Under the wrong conditions, they write, "cooperation becomes as difficult as if we had the wrong genes." Under the right ones, "it becomes difficult to prevent people from cooperating."