Social Synergy
Description
Brian Whitworth and Alex P. Whitworth:
"Let social synergy be the difference between what individuals produce working together and what they produce working individually, for any value. In the prisoner’s dilemma example, the synergy is the cooperation value (10 free years) less the defect value (two years), i.e., eight years. Synergy can be positive or negative, e.g., trade is a positive synergy and internal conflict a negative one. It pays people to join positive synergy communities but not negative ones, e.g., users leave Web sites plagued by conflicts. In competitive situations people receive benefits according to their own acts, but in social situations individuals benefit from the acts of others, e.g., roads, goods, electricity and entertainment come from the efforts of others.
Game theory recognizes this as the difference between zero–sum and non–zero–sum games. In zero–sum games, like poker, your loss is my gain, but in non–zero–sum games your loss can also be my loss. So if I destroy your roads, then I also lose the benefit of their use, i.e., diminishing the reward “pie” gives everyone a smaller share on average. Civilization can then be described as the growth of collective synergy, and conversely when a civilized society descends into chaos everyone becomes poor, as failed nations illustrate. Left to themselves, purely self–interested individuals following a zero–sum model return to what Hobbes called a “state of nature”, living lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” While non–zero–sumness is an unpleasant term, the argument that social synergy is the key to modern prosperity is a strong one (Wright, 2001).
A feature of synergy gains is that they increase disproportionately with group size. Competence gains depend on the person and so increase linearly with group size, but synergy gains arise from the social interactions which increase geometrically with group size. So synergy is especially important in very large groups. When the Internet allows millions to synergize, it becomes a critical success factor. As Shirky (2008) noted: “Here comes everybody.”
That the vast wealth of modern civilized society arises when citizens grow the common good is why even ordinary middle class individuals today have better food, health care and leisure than the richest aristocrats of the Middle Ages, and today’s “aristocrats” have more money than they can spend in a lifetime. The cause is simply the power of social synergy." (http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/3173/2647)