How Collaboration Breaks Down

Abstract:

Humans may be “super-cooperators,” but no collaboration lasts forever. This chapter summarizes the outcome of an interdisciplinary collaboration between political, social, economic, and cognitive scientists into the question of collaboration collapse. It locates the breakdown of collaboration downstream from the failure to align on either values or actions. A fourfold taxonomy is presented of the consequence of these failures: catastrophic collapse, generative reboot, contested persistence, and sputter on launch. Each failure mode is illustrated by case studies (e.g., the breakup of the Beatles, the collapse of the Hawai‘ian kapu system, the failure of the Kyoto Protocol, kinship taxation, resistance to antibiotics) to demonstrate how general principles of our taxonomy unfold over a range of historical, political, and economic contexts. Understanding the mechanisms that underpin successful collaborations and the taxonomies of dysfunction might inform efforts in pursuit of stable collaboration and enable interventions that do not disrupt or enfeeble alignment mechanisms.