Cooperation takes place across the natural world, but is a very fragile entity, easily undermined by cheats. Cheats are those that take the benefits of cooperation, while evading the costs. The only way to avoid being exploited by cheats is to build trust through frequent interaction of individuals that know each other over a long period of time. Primates build trust by grooming each other in a reciprocal way and those individuals can then count on support in other circumstances such as disputes over food or mates (Trivers, 1971). Trust built in this way is necessarily one-to-one and rarely allows cooperation to go further than between two individuals.

The great divide between humans and other primates is due to the evolution of language in our species. Language allows cooperation to take place between numbers of individuals because trust can be built across a group. Furthermore, language allows for the policing of cheats through reputation, which in turn is based on what Robin Dunbar calls ‘gossip’ (Dunbar, 1998). Language enables networked cooperation and provides a means for testing the levels of trust that individuals can place in each other. For 95 percent of our time as a species on this planet, society was based around networked cooperation and trust, and was largely egalitarian.

Writing changed everything. This new information technology first invented in Mesopotamia (Southern Iraq) 5,000 years ago enabled the emergence of the first states (Goody, 1986). The organising principle of these early states was a strict hierarchy, largely based on the literacy of a tiny minority of society. Early states enabled a huge increase in production and wealth based on the organised work of the majority within those societies, many of whom were slaves (Lévi-Strauss, 2011). Coercion rather than trust was the way that large numbers of people were engaged in productive work, which benefited the states enormously.

The invention of the alphabet allowed for writing to spread across the world and for literacy to be accessible to a slightly larger section of society. But it was the invention of another information technology, printing, that changed the basis of trust and cooperation in society to a great extent (McLuhan et al., 2011). A large increase in literacy led to the breakup of the Christian Church, an enormous expansion in science and ultimately the emergence of democracy across many societies. However, despite a major shift from agricultural labour to manufacturing, the nature of work and its organising principles changed little. Even the huge expansion in white collar work still depended on a hierarchy where supervisors were able to see their workers at all times and ensure that productivity was maintained. Trust hardly entered the equation.

It took a further invention in information technology, computers, to completely change the nature of cooperation again. Unlike writing, computer technology enabled mass access from the start, so that now nearly five billion people (60 percent of the world’s population) have internet access just 30 years after the invention of the World Wide Web. Computing facilitated a new era of networked collaboration. However, trust remains the basis for this cooperation just as it did in the pre-literate societies of our ancestors. Reciprocity, reputation, and new social norms based on trust are the only means to enable new ways of working that don’t require hierarchies or presenteeism.

 Trust remains hard to build, but just as for other primates, frequent interaction between individuals who get to know each other will provide the basis. Social activity can build trust in the same way that grooming does. Singing, dancing, sport and even eating together have been shown to build emotional closeness and trust within groups (Dunbar, 2018). Rituals can also provide a fast route to building lasting trust across networks. In this way it will be possible for people to collaborate as never before. Across huge global networks, but in cooperative ways that our pre-literate ancestors knew well.


1.  Robert Trivers, ‘The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism’, The Quarterly Review of Biology, 46:1 (1971), 35-57

2.  R.I. Dunbar, Grooming, gossip, and the evolution of language (Harvard University Press, 1998).

3.  Jack Goody, The logic of writing and the organization of society (Cambridge University Press, 1986).

4. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques (Penguin UK, 2011)

 5. Marshall McLuhan, W Terrence Gordon, Elena Lamberti, and Dominique Scheffel-Dunand, The Gutenberg galaxy: The making of typographic man (University of Toronto Press, 2011)

 6. R.I. Dunbar, ‘The Anatomy of Friendship’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22:1 (2018), 32-51.