Co-working: a Cultural Approach

I recently came across an article describing the journey former anthropologist Joe Henrich took that shook the field of social science like an earthquake. Like many prominent social scientists’, my mind was blown. 

There is a psychological game known as the Ultimatum Game. One person is given an amount of money and must decide how much of that they will give to another person. The other person can accept the offer or reject it, which causes both the receiver and the donor to walk away with nothing. Westerners typically give fair amounts and reject unfair amounts. This experiment has been replicated so frequently that it has become the basis for many behavioral understandings regarding fairness. 

But when Henrich played Ultimatum with the Machiguenga people of the Amazon basin, he found drastically different results. They gave unfair offers to the recipients, but the recipients almost never rejected them. In different cultures, Henrich found that donors offered upwards of 60% of the money, only to be rejected by the recipients. After realizing there were drastic differences in cultural behavior, Henrich looked at the demographil pool of subjects conducted in many social science experiments. 

It turns out that 96% of psychological test subjects, used to analyze human behavior, came from just a few western countries making up 12% of the population.

In western culture, our eyes presumably make (B) appear longer because we imagine these lines in the context of a home, where depth makes (B) look longer. For cultures that don't spend as much time in doors, this difference is far less pronounced. 

This led Henrich to believe that though we may understand how parts of the mind work, those understandings will be relatively superficial if our rich cultural influences are not accounted for. After I contemplated the magnitude of this revelation in social science, my thoughts turned to my internship with the New Leaf Initiative.

Collaborative working spaces, Impact Hubs, and varieties of communal environments intentionally designed to bring different types of people together—like New Leaf—are exploding throughout America, in number and popularity. Examining co-working through the same cultural lens Henrich pronounced helps to explain this. 

The majority of co-working hubs exist within western culture. 

Western civilization is very individualized, meaning we act on behalf of what is best for the individual. This is not to say we’re selfish (though some of us certainly are), but we are the most likely to promote ourselves over group advancement. Similarly, we try focus on concepts, identifying specifically their characteristics instead of analyzing them in the context of their surroundings. Other cultures seem to emphasize collectivist culture, which is everything an individualistic culture is not: working for the success of the group over the success of the individual, seeing everything in a broader context. There is nothing inherently wrong with either of these cultures, but they do play a role on our actions and behavior.

With our individualistic culture in mind, I am not surprised that groups like New Leaf are materializing rapidly. Our culture pushes away from large-scale collaboration, focusing typically on self-improvement, while other cultures naturally incorporate elements of co-working into their lives. Except there, it’s just called working. 

And applying this concept to co-working makes sense—the concept of co-working is essentially a large social experiment to see if people and communities will work better, together. 

Unfortunately, our western motivation for co-working might be just a different means to further our personal goals—that’s not too far-fetched for an individualistic society jumping into co-working with such enthusiasm. And if that is the case, then I believe that we need these co-working environments even more than we know, to strengthen the values that lead us to appreciate selflessness and community. One culture may not be better than the other, but possessing an understanding and appreciation for both can provide a unique, knowledgeable perspective that would benefit everyone. 

For whatever reason, co-working is exploding here. So like New Leaf says, let’s “work better, together;” we may discover another piece of humanity in the process.

**Also published on New Leaf Initiative's Website: http://newleafinitiative.org/blog/**