We invite you at CADI, on Friday, 21st January, at 1800 to take part in a discussion about the origin of the cooperation, discussion based on a Michael Tomasello text.

“One of the greatest debate of the western civilization is between those that consider that people help each other and cooperate naturally and society corrupts them (e.g. Rousseau), and those that consider that people are born selfish and self-centered and society is the one that teaches them to be better selves (e. g. Hobbles).”

The psychologist Michael Tomasello, one of the most known scientist that studies the problem of the distinction between humans and other animals, argues that the problem is a little bit more complicated. His and his colleagues experiments prove that there are different three types of altruism: to help a physical way, to inform and to share what you posses with others. If the chimps show altruism only in the first case, humans do it naturally (if the condition are not excessive) in all three cases. After this, Tomasello explains how this difference in cooperative behaviour produces at social level important effects, as: the presence of the “we” concept and the emergence of the social norms and institutions. We can observe how the basic elements with which the complex social order of human societies (norms and institutions) is build, have their roots in a primary cognitive characteristic that distinguish the human nature from the psychology of other primates: the unusual tendency of people for altruism, generosity and cooperation. This aptitude seems to have evolved as a mean of adapting to hunting big animals, humans being the only primates that do such thing.

Program:

18:00 Vlad Tarko presents Tomasello’s text

18:20 Discussions

Usefull links:

Michael Tomasello, ‘Why We Cooperate’ (fragmente), 2009, MIT Press

http://cadi.ro/docs/workshop/2011-01-21-Tomasello.pdf

http://cadi.ro/docs/workshop/2011-01-21-prezentare.pptx

http://email.eva.mpg.de/~warneken/video.htm