Prosocial
= book and concept
The Concept
Discussion
Prosocial vs ACT
Context: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: aims to change one's relationship with thoughts and feelings—rather than trying to eliminate or control them.
Erik Haines:
"Prosocial, developed by Paul Atkins, David Sloan Wilson, Steven Hayes, and collaborators, extends contextual behavioral science toward collective life by bringing ACT into conversation with Elinor Ostrom’s research on commons governance.
Ostrom challenged a powerful assumption: that shared resources inevitably require either centralized state control or privatization to avoid collapse. Across different contexts, communities developed durable systems of cooperation through practices involving shared purpose, fair distribution of costs and benefits, participatory decision-making, monitoring, graduated responses to violations, conflict resolution, local authority, and coordination across levels.
Prosocial adapts these insights into a framework for examining how group norms and patterns of interaction support or undermine cooperation.
The point is not to turn Ostrom’s Core Design Principles into a new moral law. Empirical regularities cannot by themselves tell us everything we ought to value, and the evolutionary history of cooperation does not derive an ethics from biology.
What this literature does show is that capacities often treated as individual achievements depend profoundly upon social conditions.
Trust is easier to sustain in groups where exploitation is not continually rewarded. Courage takes different forms when dissent leads to expulsion than when disagreement can be expressed without destroying membership. Perspective-taking matters differently when decision-making structures allow another perspective to influence an actual outcome. Commitment is easier to distinguish from obedience when authority can be questioned and rules can be revised.
This brings the behavioral argument outward. ACT asks how a person’s repertoire can become less rigid. Prosocial asks how groups can be organized so that flexibility, cooperation, disagreement, and revision remain possible in the first place.
Institutions do not mechanically manufacture virtuous people, but neither do virtuous people simply appear prior to institutions and then decide what to build. People are formed through participation in social worlds, and those people in turn reproduce, contest, or transform the structures they inhabit.
Rather than imagining virtue as a private accomplishment or an eternal definition imposed from above, we can therefore begin asking what kinds of practices make people more capable of awareness, courageous action, mutual concern, perspective-taking, cooperation, and revision — and what kinds repeatedly reward conformity, domination, isolation, avoidance, or rigid identification.
That is already a movement from therapy toward politics."
(https://www.erikhaines.org/p/the-language-parasite-and-the-symbolic)
The Book
* Book: Atkins, P. W.B., Wilson, D. S., and Hayes, S.C. (2019). Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups. Oakland, CA: Context Press.
URL = https://www.prosocial.world/
Abstract
"A groundbreaking, comprehensive program for designing effective and socially equitable groups of all sizes—from businesses and social justice groups to global organizations.
Whether you work in business or schools, volunteer in neighborhoods or church organizations, or are involved in social justice and activism, you understand the enormous power of groups to enact powerful and lasting change in the world. But how exactly do you design, build, and sustain effective groups?
Based on the work of Nobel Prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom and grounded in contextual behavioral science, evolutionary science, and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), Prosocial presents a practical, step-by-step approach to help you energize and strengthen your business or organization. Using the Prosocial model, you’ll learn to design groups that are more harmonious, have better member or employee retention, have better relationships with other groups or business partners, and have more success and longevity.
Most importantly, you’ll learn to target the characteristics that foster cooperation and collaboration—key ingredients for any effective group."
(https://contextualscience.org/publications/prosocial_using_evolutionary_science_to_build_productive_equitable_and_coll)