Friend and Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both
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Authors: Adam Galinsky,Maurice Schweitzer
Copyright © 2015 by Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer
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AG: To my parents, David and Maeda, for teaching me to be a more frequent cooperator, to be a more effective competitor, and to find the right balance between the two.
MS: To my perfect friend Michelle and the memory of my grandfather Arthur for teaching me that no matter what happens, we can always find our balance.
A
t 8:20 p.m., one week before Christmas, 1996, an explosion ripped a hole in the garden wall of the heavily guarded Japanese embassy in Lima, Peru. With the smoke still rising, 14 armed guerrillas from the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) stormed the ambassador's residence. Within minutes, everyone in the compound became a hostage.
The Japanese ambassador had been throwing a party for over 600 guests that evening; among the dignitaries were Peruvian congressmen, members of the Supreme Court, and chiefs of police.
This was a defining crisis for the Peruvian president, Alberto Fujimori, whose parents had emigrated from Japan. Although Fujimori had made significant gains against the MRTA when he came to power in 1990, by 1996 the Peruvian economy had slowed, prices were rising, and many Peruvians had become distrustful of his administration. On the eve of the embassy takeover, Fujimori's popularity had plummeted to 38 percent. Not only did the crisis put Fujimori's political future at stake, but worse, his own mother and brother were two of those taken hostage.
Initial reports revealed that the guerillas were “armed to the teeth” with machine guns and antitank weapons, and that they had wired rooms as well as the roof with explosives. They had chosen their target wellâthe ambassador's compound was encircled by a 12-foot wall, the windows had both bulletproof glass and bars, and the doors within the building had been designed to withstand grenades.
The guerrillas, who appeared to hold all the cards, began making demands: They wanted the Peruvian government to release 450 fellow MRTA members, enact market reforms, and improve living conditions in Peru's jails.
Negotiation appeared to offer the only solution. Not only did the prospects of a military resolution appear dim, but Fujimori faced both internal and substantial external pressure to reach a negotiated settlement. Japanese leaders, including Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, publicly called on Fujimori to negotiate with the hostage-takers to ensure the safe release of hostages.
Fujimori had a dilemma. He could cooperate with the hostage-takers and negotiate a solution. Or he could compete with them and launch an attack on the compound. Though there were serious drawbacks with both options, the debate focused on the dichotomy between these two approaches: compete or cooperateâact as a friend or behave like a foe.
The tension between competition and cooperation defines many of our interactions at home and at work, and to succeed across these realms requires knowing when and how to do both. In our most important relationships, from the negotiating table in the boardroom to the breakfast table with our kids, we routinely face challenges that appear to offer two opposing solutions. Yet the questionâshould we cooperate or should we competeâis often the wrong one. Our most important relationships are neither cooperative nor competitive. Instead, they are both.
Rather than choosing a single course of action, we need to understand that cooperation and competition often occur simultaneously and we must nimbly shift between the two, and that how we navigate the tension between these seemingly opposite behaviors gives us profound insight into human nature. In this book, we explore this tension and we offer advice to help you know when to compete, when to cooperateâand how to do both better to get more of what we want, at work and at home.
To understand this dilemma let's return to Fujimori. Instead of choosing whether to act as a friend or a foe, Fujimori did both.
Throughout the crisis, Fujimori publicly committed himself to a cooperative solution. In search of a negotiated agreement, he flew to Canada to meet with the Japanese prime minister, he flew to Cuba to meet with Fidel Castro, and he flew to London stating that his goal was to “find a country that would give asylum to the MRTA group.” Even four months into the crisis, Fujimori proclaimed, “We are not contemplating the use of force [except] in an unmanageable emergency, which we don't expect to happen.”
Fujimori not only made public statements about his cooperative intentions, but he also actively engaged in negotiations. He assembled a credible negotiation team that included the Canadian ambassador, an archbishop, and a Red Cross official. And the negotiations spanned a wide range of substantive issues including the release of prisoners and offers of asylum in Cuba and the Dominican Republic. They were also very successful: Through the course of negotiations, the guerrillas released hundreds of hostages and even allowed reporters into the compound.
This cooperative approach, however, reflects only the very public side of Fujimori's plan. As it turns out, Fujimori had also developed a second, secret plan soon after the crisis began. He had gathered the heads of the armed forces and the intelligence branches to formulate a military option. Over the four months of the crisis, the military smuggled equipment hidden in books and games to hostages, including miniature radios, microphones, and video cameras. The military also learned that although the guerrillas maintained tight security throughout most of the day and night, they routinely played an indoor soccer game in the early afternoonâa piece of intelligence that would prove critical to the competitive solution they later implemented.
Very early on in the crisis, the government played loud music throughout the day and performed deafening tank exercises near the compound. Although the noise might seem like an attempt to assault the senses of the hostage-takers or scare them with displays of might, in reality its purpose was to provide sound cover for a covert operation: to dig 170 meters of tunnels under the compound. At the same time, on a remote naval base, Fujimori built a replica of the ambassador's residence, and was training special units to practice storming the compound.
After more than four months, the negotiators had made real progress, so much so that the Canadian ambassador asserted that “both sides were close to settlement.” At the same time, military preparations were also complete. And that was when Fujimori took action.
On April 23, 1997, during the hostage-takers' daily game of soccer, the Peruvian military detonated three charges, killing three of the hostage-takers. Commandos streamed into the compound through the holes created by the explosions, through the front door, and up ladders to the back of the building. When it was over, all 14 guerrillas, one hostage, and two soldiers had died.
Fujimori had deceived the MRTA guerrillas. While pretending to cooperate, Fujimori had bought time to engage in a high-stakes, competitive move that ultimately served his interest. Although he lost two soldiers, he had, without making a single concession to the guerrillas' demands, saved all but one of the 72 hostages who remained in the compound.
Humans are wired to cooperate
and
compete. Sometimes we cooperate enthusiastically with people and build enduring bonds with them. At other times, we engage in fierce competition with and have little regard for others. Even within a single interaction with the same person, we can oscillate between the two approaches. In the Middle East, if you negotiate the purchase of a carpet, you are competing over the issue of price, but the seller will invariably invite you to join him first in a cup of tea, an act of cooperation. Similarly, business deals in many parts of the world are preceded by an exchange of gifts, karaoke performances, and shared meals. A key insight of this book is that, both at work and at home, we are competing
and
cooperating all the time, often at the
same
time.
The question of whether people achieve the best outcomes in life by being fiercely competitive or by being fundamentally cooperative has fueled a fierce debate. We argue that this debate misses the mark. Focusing only on how humans cooperate overlooks our hardwired instinct to compete. Similarly, focusing only on how humans pursue their self-interest misses important insights into the social advantages of cooperation. Like the Peruvian hostage crisis, succeeding in most complex human interactions involves some measure of both competing
and
cooperating. This book will help you learn how to decide when to cooperate and when to competeâand how to be better at both. It is only by appreciating how humans find the right balance between the two that we can truly understand human nature and learn how to optimize our success at work, at home, and around the world.
The ongoing tension between competition and cooperation emerges from three fundamental forces. First, resources are scarce. Second, humans are social beings. And third, our social world is inherently unstable and dynamic (or what statisticians would call stochastic). Here is how we think about these forces.
Scarcity.
We live in a world of scarce resources. Historically, the ability to acquire resources ensured our survival and the survival of our offspring. In modern times, these resources also secure our status and are central to our sense of well-being.
Scarcity triggers competitive reactions, often quickly and intensely. Consider this holiday example. The day after Thanksgiving in the United States is called Black Friday. (In finance, “in the black” means prosperity and profit.) Normally, the term Black Friday refers to the enormous volume of sales retailers enjoy on what has become the biggest shopping day of the year. But the fourth Friday in November of 2008 brought new meaning to the term. Throughout the night of Thanksgiving and into the early morning hours of Friday, a group of suburban shoppers gathered for a Walmart sale in Valley Stream, New York. Walmart, which would open at 5:00 a.m., had advertised a limited supply of bargain-priced items, some as much as 86 percent off their normal price.
The group of shoppers waiting outside, who only hours earlier had shared an American tradition that epitomizes cooperationâthe Thanksgiving mealâtransformed overnight into an unruly horde. By 3:30 a.m., the police had to be summoned to help control the chaos. As the opening time drew near, the crowd began to chant “Push the doors in,” and one customer taped up a poster reading
BLITZ LINE STARTS HERE
. The employees, hoping to contain the crowd, formed a human chain. They never had a chance.
The 2,000 customers literally took the doors off their hinges and stampeded into the store, knocking employees out of the way and climbing over them. The lucky employees managed to climb on top of vending machines. Jdimytai Damour, who had just celebrated Thanksgiving with his half sister a few hours before, was not one of the lucky ones. He was trampled to death. But his tragedy was not an aberration. Black Friday turns dark every Thanksgiving, spawning headlines like this one from the
Huffington Post
on November 29, 2013: “Holiday Spirit: Shootings, Stabbings, Brawls.”
These Black Friday stampedes highlight how quickly cooperation can disappear when a resource appears to be in short supply. But while scarcity breeds competition, cooperation is often the best avenue for attaining scarce resources and holding on to them. To secure scarce resources, in other words, we need to nimbly navigate the shifting sands of our social world, and we do this both by competing
and
by cooperating.
Social.
Humans are inherently social animals. As humans evolved, their brains grew in size and intricacy to manage the complexity of human social networks.
The link between social connection and cognitive functioning is so tight that we literally cannot remain sane without social relationships. Consider for a moment one of the greatest forms of torture: solitary confinement. Prison wardens learned long ago how social disconnection can be far more painful than physical torture. The human capacity to endure physical pain is quite high, but within three days of social isolation the mind descends into hallucination, spasms of anger, and ultimately malaise and apathy. The damage caused by even a short period of social isolation can be so profound that when people emerge from it they both constantly crave and are often unfit for social interaction.
Social connections are so essential for our survival and well-being that we not only cooperate with others to build relationships, we also compete with others for friends. And often we do both at the same time. Take gossip. Through gossip, we bond with our friends, sharing titillating details. But at the same time, we are creating potential foes in the targets of our gossip. Or consider dueling holiday parties where people compete to see who will attend
their
party. We can even see this tension in social media as people compete for the most friends and followers or the most likes and retweets. At the same time, competitive exclusion can also breed cooperation. High school cliques, fraternities, and country clubs use this formula to great effect: It is through selective inclusion
and exclusion
that they breed loyalty and create lasting social bonds.
Unstable and Dynamic.
We live in an unstable, dynamic world. Within a matter of moments, resources can vanish and social relationships can crumble. Simple events, like learning new information about how much someone else earns at work, can swing people quickly and dramatically from a cooperative mindset into a competitive one.
The interplay of these three principlesâscarcity, sociability, and dynamic instabilityâcan be clearly seen in the Grevy's zebras in Kenya. Work done by Dan Rubenstein of Princeton shows that the scarcity of a critical resource, in this case water, dynamically alters basic social relationships in zebra society. When the Grevy's zebras inhabit arid and parched climates, their mating relationships tend to be temporary and unstable. However, when the Grevy's zebras suddenly have greater access to water so that individual zebras no longer need to compete for water, their social relationships shift dramatically into more stable collectives.
Siblingsâboth humans and animalsâunderstand how the interplay of these three principles drives the dynamic tension between cooperation and competition. Our relationships with our siblings often form our most cooperative relationships. We even have a name for it:
brotherly love
. On the other hand, our relationships with our siblings can also be some of our most competitive. We have a name for this too:
sibling rivalry
. Siblings are our friends
and
our foes.
Many babies start competing with their siblings before their siblings are even born. How? By breast-feeding. Breast-feeding can suppress ovulation, so the longer babies can convince their mothers to breast-feed, the more attention they will receive before a prospective sibling arrives. And it's not just food and material rewards that siblings compete for; they also compete for another scarce resource, parental attention.
On the other hand, the genetic overlap and shared identity between siblings fosters intense cooperation. In fact, this sibling cooperation has been measured in studies of the ground squirrel. Ground squirrels are surprisingly altruistic: When they see a predator near a fellow squirrel, they screech to lure the predator away from their endangered compatriot. This act epitomizes the spirit of altruism: The squirrel endangers himself to help another. What is interesting is that the volume of the cry rises when two squirrels are closely related. Among siblings, squirrels screech loudest.
Given their shared upbringing, siblings come to know each other particularly well. With this intimate knowledge, siblings develop both the greatest capacity to empathize with each otherâ¦and the greatest capacity to torment each other.
Some of the most dramatic shifts between cooperation and competition occur on the political stage. Consider the changing nature of relationships between countries in World War II. The Soviet Union and Germany formed a cooperative alliance on the eve of war in 1939. Their pact promised neutrality if either was attacked, and even described how Germany and the Soviet Union would divide Northern and Eastern Europe into different spheres of influence. Yet this cooperative deal collapsed less than two years laterâ¦when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.
Conversely, within a remarkably short period the United States and Japan became friends instead of foes. In 1945, as World War II drew to a close, the United States firebombed 67 Japanese cities and dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing unimaginable destruction. The ferocity of these attacks convinced the Japanese leadership to surrender, and just days later American General Douglas MacArthur led the Allied occupation of Japan. Immediately after taking charge, MacArthur led the American pivot to cooperation. He made it illegal for any of the occupying Americans in Japan to assault Japanese people or even to eat any of the scarce supplies of Japanese food. One of the guiding principles of the occupation was to develop Japan's economy. Another was to build institutions to support freedom and democracy. This pivot transformed a bitter enemy into a stalwart ally.
This book explores a new way of thinking about the tension between cooperation and competition. We reveal how these three forcesâscarcity, sociability, and dynamic instabilityâprofoundly influence how we shift between friend and foe. In doing so, we draw on research across the social sciences (psychology, economics, sociology, political science). We explore animal studies to demonstrate that this tension between cooperation and competition is primal. And we draw on recent findings in neuroscience to reveal how this tension is wired into the very architecture of the human brain.
Every relationship contains the possibility of both cooperation and competition. Instead of orienting ourselves to cooperate or compete, we need to prepare to do both. By understanding that we are simultaneously friends and foes, we not only gain deeper insight into human nature but also gain insights into how to be more successful in our relationships at work, in our communities, and at home.
By revealing the fundamental facets of the friend-foe tension, we answer a number of intriguing questions, such as: Why are our fiercest rivalries with those who are closest to us? Why is hierarchy essential for some tasks but potentially fatal for others? Why are some teams better off when they have
less
talent? Where do gender differences
really
come from? Why do we let complete strangers sleep in our houses when we go on vacation? Why can teaching our kids to lie make them
more
cooperative members of society?
We also explain how the same skill that helps us avoid being called a racist can help us figure out just the right time to start a new business; why it can feel better to be on the job market during a recession; why you want to be first on an election ballot but perform last on
American Idol
; and when you want to make the first offer at the negotiating table.
Along the way, we draw lessons from both research and illuminating examples from all over the world. These studies and real-world illustrations will challenge many of the assumptions you currently hold about your friends and your foes.
We conclude each chapter with a section called “Finding the Right Balance,” which offers specific advice to help you navigate your personal and professional relationships more successfully. Through this book you will learn: How to “lean in” without getting pushed back, how to gain powerâ¦and hold on to it, and how to turn your weaknesses into strengths. You will discover how to improve your ability to detect deception, and how to gain the trust of others quickly. And when you fall short, as we all invariably will, we offer strategies for how to deliver an effective apology. We offer insight into how to move the odds in your favor when you interview for a job and gain compensation for your talents.
To successfully navigate our social world, we need to find the right balance between cooperation and competition. This book offers a set of tools to help you navigate the shifting sands of our social world. By keeping your balance, in every area of your life, you will learn how to be a better friend
and
a more formidable foe.