Category: cooperation

Rules and Duties

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August 23, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

Last week I wrote about the role that media plays in our group formation. This week I want to look at the unwritten rules or norms that form the structure of social and political groups. In an interview with Ezra Klein on July 31, 2026, the author and journalist Maggie Haberman recalled, “A Democratic strategist said to me in 2016, right after Trump won, that the entire country was about to finally understand how much of our system is norms and not laws.” After three years in office, Trump was learning to push the boundaries of those norms when the pandemic got in the way.

“I’m back!” Trump might have announced at the start of Trump 2.0. Within months, he bulldozed a number of norms. These included tearing down part of the White House, enacting a punishing series of tariffs on allied nations like Canada, and attempts to rewrite the citizenship clause of the Constitution by Presidential edict. Trump voided a campaign promise to avoid forever foreign wars and joined an Israeli attack on Iran in June 2025. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had tried to persuade Presidents Obama and Biden to conduct a war against Iran. They declined to join Netanyahu’s holy crusade. This past February, Netanyahu found his sucker, convincing Trump that a quick and decisive strike at Iran’s top leadership and nuclear sites would usher in a regime friendly to Israel and the U.S.

Common Rules

Psychologist Joshua Greene (2013) began his book Moral Tribes talking about the tragedy of common sense morality. For each tribe there is a set of common sense rules or norms. What makes common sense to the members of one group, though, may not make sense in another group. Naturally, this leads to conflict between groups. In 1992, Rodney King pleaded, “can we all get along?” (Source) That plea echoes in our ears. Why can’t we get along?

Greene cites several studies that show that both humans and monkeys have an in-group bias. White adults and children as young as six years old show a preference for white faces over black (p. 52). Monkeys associate tasty fruit with the faces of other members of their group. They associate unpleasant things like spiders with members who are not in their group. The neural responses come mainly from the amygdala, the region of our brain responsible for emotion and heightened vigilance. Green concludes that “our brains are wired for tribalism” (p. 54).

In his book Determined, neuroscientist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky identifies the hormone oxytocin, produced by the hypothalamus, which is responsible for this in-group bonding (p. 54). It is the Us and Them hormone that strengthens bonding with other members of our group but also makes us more aggressive toward those we perceive as opponents in other groups. The levels of oxytocin and the receptors for the hormone vary with each individual.

We are more likely to survive in a group with others like us because they are more likely to know and follow the norms of the group. I’ll remind readers of a theme that I’ve discussed in the past several weeks. We come in contact with the world through our senses, but we engage with the world through our errors. We favor any behavior or group that helps us achieve more accuracy in our predictions.

Fairness

If someone sues me and I win, I think that the person who sued me should have to pay my legal costs. That’s only fair. Greene references a 1995 survey by the magazine U.S. News and World Report in which respondents were asked the same question and 85% agreed with me. Some of the surveyed respondents were asked the opposite question. What if the shoe were on the other foot and you were the one who sued and lost? Only 44% thought they should have to pay the other person’s legal fees. Greene calls this biased fairness and numerous studies have confirmed this tendency. Our self-interest modifies our sense of fairness.

Cooperation

The survival of a group depends on collective action, a coordination between leaders and followers. A leader makes a decision. Others in the group follow. The followers may be loyal to the leader or loyal to the group as a matter of principle. In 1934, Germany’s President Paul von Hindenburg died. Members of the armed forces no longer swore a traditional oath to Germany’s constitution and the republic but to Adolph Hitler personally. The so-called Führer Oath was

“I swear by God this holy oath, that I will render to Adolf Hitler, Führer of the German Reich and People, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, unconditional obedience, and that I am ready, as a brave soldier, to risk my life at any time for this oath.” (Source)

Strangely enough, it was not Hitler who created the oath but the top military brass.

Justification

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) formulated a categorical imperative to evaluate the moral motivations of any act. We should act according to a principle that we wish were universal law (Source). For Kant, the group was the entire community of rational human beings.

However, Kant’s moral imperative promotes greater conflict because people are not entirely rational. Greene, Sapolsky and others point out that the neurology of our brains is bimodal. We have an automatic mode that is instinctive and emotional, and a manual mode that is deliberative (p. 137 in Greene’s book, for instance). We need both modes to survive.

In some cases these two processes work in tandem to justify our actions. Consider the case of an abortion protestor who detonates an explosive in or near a clinic. The aim of his automatic brain process is a visceral desire to close the clinic. Enter Kant doing a voice over like Rod Serling on the Twilight Zone. How should we evaluate this protestor’s actions? Should we make a universal law that we can bomb any institution that we consider evil or whose aims we disagree with? The protestor might respond that he is engaged in a war against evil and war justifies the bending of universal laws. After all, we permit killing during war in violation of the commandment not to kill.

Common Duties

Duties are behaviors that demonstrate loyalty to a group. They acknowledge and respect the rules and the group. Some duties are enforceable with punishment. A soldier in the military has duties to his group, his company or platoon. Failure to abide by those duties can ultimately mean court martial. A doctor has certain professional duties, chiefly among them a duty to care. Any lapse in care on his part might cause a patient or family to start a lawsuit. Punishments help enforce adherence to duty and loyalty to the group.

Some duties are enforceable only by ostracization. The Amish community practices Meidung, a shunning of a member who violates the rules of the community or disrespects the elders (Source). Members of the community should restrict eating with the shunned member, conducting business, or certain forms of social interaction with that person.

This year, the Vatican excommunicated Catholics who continue to practice in services by a conservative Catholic splinter group called the Society of Saint Pius X (Source). Excommunication in the Catholic Church does not void a person’s baptism but forbids and voids any participation in the other sacramental ceremonies like Communion.

Here Come The Judge!

We judge others and are conscious of being judged by others. We want to avoid blame. Next week I want to continue to explore these aspects of group dynamics. I hope to see you then!

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Photo by Mario Purisic on Unsplash

Greene, J. D. (2013). Moral tribes: Emotion, reason, and the gap between us and them. Penguin Press.

Sapolsky, R. M. (2023). Determined: A science of life without free will. Penguin Press.

Connect America

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November 1, 2020

by Steve Stofka

Listening to a talk show “Rambling with Gambling” when I was a kid, I was surprised to learn that city people – that was my family – paid for a small part of the telephone service that country people had. Why was this? I asked my mom. She explained that it cost the telephone company less to supply service to city folks. We helped the country folks, so they did not have to pay such high rates.

Well, what do they do for us, I asked? She thought for a moment. We spend less on milk, she said. No matter what the weather is, the farmers must wake up early every morning to milk the cows so that we can have fresh milk every day. If they were to charge for all that extra effort, we would pay a lot more for our milk. The dairy farmers help pay for our milk and we help pay for their telephone service, she explained.

Community was an interconnected web of people sharing their advantages and disadvantages so that everyone’s circumstances were a little more equal. If a classmate did not understand fractions and we did, we should help them. We shouldn’t call them stupid.

Everyone’s brain is wired a little bit differently. Some ideas “take” easier in one person’s brain than another. It’s like a telephone circuit. A teacher might show a math idea and it goes in one kid’s brain, easily makes all the right connections, and finds a permanent place. In another person’s brain, that idea loses the connection or gets a busy signal, and the idea doesn’t take hold the first time. That person might need to be shown the idea in a different way. That’s why some people have a knack for certain professions.

Well, I always get it the first time, I said. Well, no you don’t, my mother said. When we “get” something, it seems new so we think that this must be the first time we’ve heard it. Then we get impatient when we must show something more than once to someone else.

I can look back with amusement at the simplistic view of humanity that I had as a child, but I want to believe that there is a sense of cooperation, tolerance, and rationality in people.

In Donald Trump’s America, there is less of that. Cooperation is composed of temporary transactional alliances with others in a battle with our neighbors. Tolerance is weakness. Rationality makes one’s actions predictable to the enemy. Donald Trump justifies his irrational, flip-flop style of decision making as gamesmanship. Rationality makes law and order possible. Without it, despotism rules.

I heard a BBC reporter describe Donald Trump’s style of politics as “pugilistic.” I would call it demeaning, and a danger to democracy. Those with experience and rational planning have left the administration. They include Jim Mattis, who has devoted his life to national service and shares a belief in the American ideal and America’s leadership role in the global community. He could not be party to Donald Trump’s trampling on the Constitution and the ideals embodied in the American flag.

Cooperation, tolerance, and rationality are ideas that find a permanent home in the minds of some more easily than others. At 74, Donald Trump is unlikely to make the new neural connections that nurture those ideas. He loses his train of thought more frequently, so he prefers rallies where his words are written out for him on a teleprompter. After an impromptu jab at his political enemies, he can recover his sense of continuity. When he doesn’t have cue cards, he relies on favorite phrases and superlatives to convey the sense that he remembers what he is talking about.

Donald Trump may fancy himself as an innovative disruptor, but he is little more than an angry child, an anarchist who rips all the wires out of the switchboard. A hundred years ago, the telephone connected Americans. Almost thirty years ago, the internet connected the global community. We need a President who can connect and implement the ideas of cooperation, tolerance, and rationality that have distinguished America. Joe Biden’s Presidency can be the switchboard that Connects America.

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Photo by John Barkiple on Unsplash