It's In Our Nature

The recent "Connected" reading we had about our instincts to create social networks, and survival techniques made me think of many things. Christakis and Fowler mention that "free riders" are much more likely than helpful "cooperaters" to survive in a given situation. But, using the example from the tv show "Survivor", they also say that people tend to ignore their selfish tendencies when it comes to people within their social networks or groups.

This made me think of the classic prompt, which I believe was recently turned into a movie... If you could push a button that would kill someone somewhere in the world, but get you $1 million, would you? More people certainly consider this when they assume that they would be killing someone they don't know, which is definitely the more likely scenario when you compare how many people there are in the world and how many people you actually know. But when it is thought about more deeply, people often back off a little bit after considering what it would be like if someone they knew, or even themselves, were the ones killed by a random greedy person they don't know halfway across the world.

Not so much in the example above, but oftentimes the reason why people are less selfish within their networks is because there are deep feelings involved, or like in the Survivor example, you may need the other person's help in the future because they will be in your life in the future. Many of us may consider pushing a button for $1 million and killing a random person, but probably just as many people would not even consider pushing a button for $1 million if it would even just injure someone we are close to.