What do the sciences have to teach us about mutual aid?

Mutual aid – which is when individuals collaborate for their mutual benefit – does not only take place between humans: all living beings collaborate in many different ways. For centuries, biologists and ecologists have been describing the collaboration between related individuals (such as within ant colonies), between individuals of the same species (such as a shoal of fish), and even between different species (for example, the pollination of plants by animals). In fact, all these forms of collaboration have existed between all living beings for almost 4 billion years.

There is so much collaboration, and of so many different kinds, that we can safely say that mutual aid is a basic principle of the living world. What is more, as the Geographer, Pierre Kropotkine, showed in his 1902 book, ‘Mutual Aid, a Factor of Evolution’, mutual aid is even a principle of natural selection: those who survive are not the strongest, but those who cooperate most. The Russian scholar also showed that the environment plays an important role in the emergence of mutual aid: the more hostile the environment, the more mutual aid there is between living beings. This claim, which is counter-intuitive for a ‘liberal subject’ (in the philosophical sense), has been rediscovered by the experimental sciences, and is easily explained: the ‘selfish’ and solitary individual has fewer chances of surviving in a difficult environment.

Thus, over the decades, the sciences have deconstructed the received idea that nature is a war of everyone against everyone else (the ‘law of the jungle’), where there is a permanent state of competition and aggression. That is just liberal mythology: in nature, mutual aid, cooperation, symbiosis, mutualism and altruism play a very important role. But how does this manifest itself within our species?

Mutual aid between humans is spontaneous…

The first idea that needs to be established is that mutual aid and prosocial behaviour are generally very spontaneous. This can be demonstrated in several ways. The first is to observe what happens when catastrophic events take place, when social order suddenly disappears and the authorities momentarily lose the means of exercising control. The victims’ stress and the speed of events most often prevent rational reasoning: we do what we can, and we act on our reflexes.

Contrary to received wisdom, when a disaster takes place, panic is rare: people remain calm, organise themselves and display prosocial, altruistic and sometimes even extraordinary behaviour. The analysis of victims’ accounts of disasters by psychologists and sociologists has given clear results. The following is an example of the numerous studies that have been carried out: “Thomas A. Glass, of John Hopkins University, and his collaborators analysed human reactions during ten very different disasters that took place between 1989 and 1994: two earthquakes, two train crashes, one air crash, two gas explosions, one hurricane, one tornado, and a bomb explosion which caused a fire. The number of victims ranged from 3 to more than 200. The researchers systematically found that victims had spontaneously formed groups, with leaders, had fixed collectively accepted rules and shared out roles with a view to helping as many people as possible to survive”.¹

How can this be explained? What individuals who are stressed and sometimes in shock want, above all, is security – they are therefore not prone to violence. This was the case, for example, when the Twin Towers collapsed in New York in 2001, after the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in December 2004, after the earthquake that hit Haiti in 2010, or the Bataclan concert hall, during the terrorist attack of 13 November 2015. In addition to the great waves of solidarity that come from the outside, gripping witness accounts describe how people on the inside risked their lives to help perfect strangers. Extraordinary conditions therefore lead to extraordinary behaviour.

Another way to explore the spontaneity of mutual aid is through experiments. Researchers test the behaviour of participants using economic games where they control all the parameters, the most well-known of these being the ‘Public Goods Game’. In this game, researchers ask participants (for example, ten people around a table) who do not know each other, and to whom they have given the same amount of money (for example, 20 euros), to put some of their money in a shared pot. Each round, the amount in the shared pot is doubled, then redistributed equally to the players. Thus, if everyone plays collectively, everyone wins (they are richer), but if only a few altruists contribute (and the selfish people prefer to keep their money), then they will end up with less money than the selfish people (who will have benefited from the shared pot)… It is a dilemma that has a great deal to teach us!

The main result of this experiment is that between 40% and 60% of the participants contribute to the shared pot during the first round, even when the players do not know each other. More broadly, by getting people from fifteen traditional societies to play these economic games, including hunter-gatherers, nomads, semi-nomads and sedentary peoples (such as the Machiguengua from Peru, the Hadza and the Sangu from Tanzania, or the Torguud from Mongolia), the researchers realised that, everywhere in the world, the participants spontaneously contributed to the shared pot, with extremely variable participation rates, ranging from very small contributions to the whole amount that they possessed. We are a far cry from the rational and selfish Homo economicus!

By measuring the time that each player takes to make a decision in the Public Goods Game, other researchers observed that the subjects who answered quickly were more cooperative than those who took time to decide. They therefore developed an experiment where they forced the players to decide more quickly (spontaneously) and observed that this led to an increase in the contributions to the shared pot! On the other hand, forcing the players to take more time to think (by encouraging reflection) reduced the contributions. When players were put in conditions that encouraged intuition, this increased contributions to the shared pot, whereas a context where they reflected made them more selfish.

These results echo the incredible stories of anonymous heroes who have shown extreme altruism by voluntarily risking their lives to try to save someone else. For a century, the Carnegie Hero Fund in the United States has been collecting these stories and honours these ordinary heroes by awarding them a medal. Psychologists asked volunteers to read these stories and evaluate if these altruistic acts were more spontaneous or the result of reflection: the vast majority of the readers thought that they were spontaneous acts. A journalist recently asked the secretary of the Carnegie Hero Fund if they thought there was a common thread running through all these acts of bravery, and the secretary replied that the majority of the people had not been able to evaluate the risks and benefits of their actions: they simply felt compelled to act…

Is this also the case in everyday life, without stressful conditions? The spontaneous provision of aid in a non-emergency situation was measured in a major social psychology experiment carried out in 23 major cities in the world in 2001. This involved, for example, telling someone in the street that they had dropped their pen, offering to help a person with a limp to pick up a pile of magazines, or helping a blind person cross the road. The results were clear: mutual aid is common, everywhere.

The level of spontaneous mutual aid proved to be relatively constant and homogenous in each city, which suggests that each has its own culture of mutual aid. The results varied a lot between different cultures, ranging from 40% of prosocial behaviour in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) to 93% in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). The researchers noticed that these variations depended on two factors: Latin culture (Spain, Brazil, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Mexico were particularly generous) and the economic productivity of the city (the more income the inhabitants have, the less likely they are to help).

Therefore, to summarise, we can safely say that people are spontaneously prosocial, as has been shown in hundreds of experiments, in dozens of countries, on every continent, and using different experiments.² Human beings therefore behave in a much less selfish manner than certain economists would like to have us think.

… but fragile

Mutual aid begins with an act of giving, which produces a very powerful obligation of reciprocity in the receiver. This system of ‘giving – receiving – and giving back’ is at the heart of mutual aid, and, by extension, of all social ties. Thus, reciprocity is the mainstay of mutual aid among humans. If this occurs within a group, human cooperation can reach much higher levels than in other species, in terms of intensity and size of group.

Nevertheless, though reciprocal aid between two or several persons can be very powerful, it tends to become more diluted over time, and as the number of individuals in a group increases. In the Public Goods Game, as in real life, there is always a small proportion of profiteers, cheats and egotists. Even though their numbers are small, they drag the group down into an egotistical and competitive spiral, which eventually takes the whole group with it. As soon as a few people only look out for themselves or cheat, and other participants realise this, numerous co-operators stop participating, which leads to the collapse of contributions to the public good. And what is the end result? Everyone loses, even though everyone thought that they would be able to profit individually from the situation.

Mutual aid is therefore the result of a fragile balance which can gradually be lost, or can collapse in the blink of an eye, especially within a group. This can happen even if the individuals have good relations of reciprocity, even if the majority of them are well intentioned, and even if everyone is aware that mutual aid benefits the group. A small number of antisocial acts are all it takes for the majority to lose their desire to be virtuous.

To counter the risk of mutual aid breaking down, humans have developed several mechanisms to reinforce and stabilise mutual aid as they have evolved:

1. Punishing cheats and rewarding altruists. This is a feature that can be observed in every human culture. When these rules are established, cooperation, altruism and contributions to the common good increase rapidly to very high levels. This is what researchers call ‘strong reciprocity’.

2. Reputation. An altruistic act can return to the giver via an indirect channel. This is what researchers call ‘indirect reciprocity’: you help someone in a group, knowing that reciprocity could come from any of the other people in the group. But, for this to happen, you need to recognise the others individually. Anonymity can weaken the obligations of reciprocity (forgetting, defection, indifference, etc.), which can make the general level of mutual aid fall sharply.

The reputation mechanism helps to ensure that there is a high level of confidence by placing a sort of ‘reliability label’ on each of the group members, which allows the people to be recognised without knowing them. People do value their reputation… and tend to cooperate with people with a good reputation. In large groups that are still on a ‘human’ scale (neighbourhoods, villages, businesses, etc.), information circulates (gossip), and it rapidly becomes clear who the cheats and the profiteers are. Reputation therefore becomes a very precious piece of information, like a score that is updated with every interaction and which reveals our past actions. This score is therefore like a form of capital that can be accumulated but can also be lost. It holds the promise for each individual of a (socially) prosperous future.

3. Social norms and institutions. Regardless of the size of the group (family, clan, association, business, club, religion, nation, etc.), its members obey shared social norms that encourage group cohesion because they allow codes of reciprocity to be transmitted quickly and effectively in different places and at different times. However, in large groups, these norms can only be sustained via stable, long-term institutions. The latter have the disadvantage of producing a ‘colder’, more impersonal reciprocity (‘invisible reciprocity’), but they allow it to be extended to levels that are ‘extraordinary’, in the original sense of the word, and to maintain social cohesion within huge groups, even between perfect strangers, which is unique in the living world.

4. Feelings of trust, security and fairness/justice. For there to be strong and generalised mutual aid within a group, there are three essential ingredients: all the members of the group need to feel secure, which depends on the constitution of a good ‘membrane’ (the rules fixed by the group, its reason for being, its identity); there also need to be feelings of equality and fairness, which allow the harmful effects of feelings of injustice to be avoided (anger, resentment, antisocial behaviour and the desire for punishment); and thirdly, feelings of trust, which are the result of the two previous ingredients, and which allow each individual to do their best for the good of the group. If these three feelings are present and mechanisms allow reciprocity to be stabilised in the group, then everything clicks into place and the whole group (temporarily) becomes a living organism, and a particularly effective superorganism.

5. External factors. There are three external factors that can influence mutual aid: the presence of a common enemy (a ‘big bad wolf’), a hostile environment, and the existence of an easily quantifiable and reachable shared objective. These three factors ensure that the goals of all the individuals in the group are aligned, which makes reciprocity more fluid and allows feelings of security, equality/fairness and trust to be established more easily. The introduction of a greater threat transforms former rivalries into solidarity. Danger and challenges therefore considerably encourage mutual aid.

Understanding, experimenting, and putting into practice

The aim of highlighting these mechanisms is simple: we need to renew our competencies in mutual aid, cooperation and solidarity… in a world that is dominated by the ideology of competition. Why? In order to get through this century of disasters more peacefully.

How do disasters affect mutual aid? And how does mutual aid function when there are disasters? These are central questions for humanitarians, and there is still a lot to learn. Answering these questions will lead to others: How do we avoid conflicts? How should we establish mutual aid networks during a crisis? / or before a crisis? How do these mutual aid networks protect people from shocks?

The resilience of human communities in the face of adversity is intimately linked to these fundamental questions. Over and above understanding these mechanisms, the goal today is to apply all this knowledge in the field. But in order to do this, first we need to believe in the incredible potential of mutual aid between humans (which is by no means a given!). Only once this is the case will it be possible to establish practices and test ideas to scale in the field. The stakes are very high, because when we are faced with adversity, we always have the same choice: civil war or solidarity.

1. Lecomte (2012), La bonté humaine, Odile Jacob, 2012., p 30.
2. You can read more on the nature of this spontaneity (epigenetic? innate?, etc.) in chapter 2 of my book “L’entraide, L’autre loi de la jungle” (LLL, 2017), co-written with Gauthier Chapelle. The book also contains all the references to the scientific articles mentioned.