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Radio Berkman 183: The Cooperation

From the MediaBerkman blog:

Are human beings — as consultants, researchers, and the authors of business books have thought for years — fundamentally motivated by self interest? Or is there a deeper cooperative instinct that drives us to work?

Those are the questions that fuel Yochai Benkler‘s investigation in The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest. In it Benkler challenges the rather embarrassing idea that people are primarily selfish by citing examples — from collective farming to neuroscience to the world’s richest corporations — demonstrating that people are a lot more cooperative than they get credit for.

Benkler spoke with David Weinberger about his new book for this week’s Radio Berkman.

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Projects & Tools 01

Past

Cooperation

The Cooperation Group is an interdisciplinary community of scholars studying networked cooperation. Our current activities include a series of empirical research projects on…


Publications 01

Publication
Aug 9, 2011

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest

Yochai Benkler draws on cutting-edge findings from neuroscience, economics, sociology, evolutionary biology, political science, and a wealth of real world examples to reveal how…