Paul Atkins

6th July 2023

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ProSocial World is currently undergoing a process to clarify its shared purpose. As an organization, we consider shared purpose and identity to be the most fundamental principle. While much of our work has been focused on helping other groups find their shared purpose, we have also had to undergo an extensive process to find our own. This process has involved consulting with staff and community members from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and disciplines.

Through this process, I have learned that the ProSocial World community is now large and diverse enough that others may see our purpose differently from me, without this being a problem. In our quest for a shared identity and purpose, we aren't seeking absolute agreement; rather, we aim for enough of a consensus that effective collaboration can occur. The goal here is successful working together, not absolute identity with one another.  And so it seems most important to me that each of us simultaneously holds two questions in awareness, even when they are in tension:

With that in mind, ProSocial World staff have recently worked together to develop a statement of shared purpose as follows:

I believe in this purpose. It both inspires and guides me, as I will explain below. But the practical part of my heart/mind really wants to know more about how we plan to consciously evolve. So I find myself wanting to add something more specific. Here is what I like to say to people if I only have a moment to explain ProSocial:

Of course, this is my own way of speaking. When someone asks you “What is ProSocial?” or “What is ProSocial for?”, you will undoubtedly have a different answer. My answer is a thread in the cloth that is woven to yield our collective impact upon the world.

Usually saying something like this raises a question about one of the elements of this statement, so in the rest of this article, I unpack the three main pieces of this statement, starting at the end.

There are many capabilities that enhance collaboration. But for me, at the heart of it all, is a capacity to perceive where collaboration is failing, and to step up to mobilise people to tackle the challenge of enhancing collaboration. In other words, I see the core individual capacity for collaboration as leadership.

Now I know as soon as I say the ‘L’ word, many people will assume I mean being in a position of leadership or at least a role where one is telling others what to do. That is not what I mean at all. I want groups to be “leaderful” in the sense that we are all of us leading, as much of the time as possible. Because, for me, leadership is a behaviour - specifically the rather complex behaviour of sensing and communicating what needs to change, while also mobilising people to work together to achieve that change. When many people in a group behave as leaders in this sense, the group can rapidly find a shared purpose and the means to achieve that purpose.

So, for me at least, when I talk about building individual capacity, I am focused on helping people learn to do a kind of facilitative, ‘servant’ leadership that relies upon a host of other capabilities: systemic sensemaking, listening, dialogue, visioning, authentic expression, courage, imagination and love.  In my view, if we genuinely empower enough people to dream of the futures they want, and to boldly take action in a way that honours both their own and others’ dreams, then we will shift the needle toward a world that works better for all.

So this then, is the ‘bottom-up’ capacity building I think ProSocial World is seeking to do, the capacity to lead towards what matters most from any position in a group. Thanks to David Sloan Wilson’s wonderful work on multi-level selection, I think ProSocial World is also making a cultural contribution ‘top-down’ by helping to change our collective narrative regarding what is, and what might be possible.  We aim to question how individualism has crept into every facet of our lives and honour human beings as both whole and complete in themselves but also parts of larger wholes that discourage pure self-interest and encourage collaboration.  David’s various works, together with a host of recent works like Bregman’s “Humankind: A Hopeful History”, Graeber & Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything” build upon Lin Ostrom’s core, Nobel-prize winning insight that humans can be remarkably cooperative when we create favourable conditions for cooperation to occur.

In some ways, this work is even more powerful than the bottom-up work of enhancing facilitative leadership.  Work done by the Common Cause organisation in the United Kingdom makes it clear that the stories we tell about the nature of humanity matter. Our identities shape our actions. When we believe others are selfish, we act more selfishly ourselves. And when we believe others are more benevolent, we act more compassionately and cooperatively [insert citation].  Of course, we are not naive. Human beings can be incredibly cruel and selfish. But despite what corporate and social media might have you believe, most human relations are civil, amiable and constructive. And, if we bring the facilitative leadership skills I discussed earlier: listening for needs and values, finding shared vision and purpose, and mobilising people to tackle tough challenges together, we know we can increase the frequency of civil, and decrease the frequency of uncivil, behaviours.

Let’s now consider what it means to create a world that works for all.

What might ‘a world that works for all’ look like?  I don’t have in mind a world where everybody is always happy. Life is simply not like that. Suffering is built into human existence - as soon as we care for anything, we care about failing to attain it, or losing it. We project fearful futures and regret mistakes we have made in the past.

A world that works for all is, in my view, a result of as many people as possible being alive to their own needs and the needs of others, moment to moment. By ‘alive to’, I mean not only sensing needs but striving as best they can to meet those needs.

And of course, this is continuing, ongoing work. Our needs exist in the relational space between ourselves and others, and they are continually evolving. I am suggesting that asking in almost every moment that allows, “What really matters most to me in this situation?” and “What really matters most to ‘them’ in this situation?” is the most simple but profound thing we can do toward co-creating a world that works for all.

If movement toward a world that works for all depends upon being alive to our own and others' needs. It is important that we have a mature understanding of what a need actually is.

Humans essentially live in two worlds simultaneously: a world of direct physical contingencies and a world of meaning. If I drop a brick on my toe, the pain is real and direct. But choosing to label myself as clumsy and unable to continue building happens in a world of meaning.  I am only distinguishing between these worlds for the purposes of this article, not because they differ ontologically. Contextual Behavioural Science makes it clear that meaning-making is a naturalistic process ultimately arising from the same mechanisms that any organism uses to learn.  It is, in that sense, non-dualistic.

Nonetheless, these two broad streams of experience feel very different. One is 'out-there', public and objective, the other is 'in-here', private and subjective. So let’s divide up the world into two broad streams of reality that humans experience - the world of direct, physical contingencies and the world of private, verbal contingencies that we call 'meaning', there are two correspondingly broad kinds of needs that humans have: physical and psychological.

Physical needs include food, water, warmth and physical safety or freedom from harm. These needs are basic to existence as an organism. I define a need as a requirement for thriving.  Without adequate healthy food and water, for example, it is impossible for a human to thrive. We hope that ProSocial helps create more situations where these needs are met for all, but here I want to focus on psychological needs because they are more complex and less widely understood.

Some people see psychological needs as entirely subjective and culturally relative. There is some truth in this view. Psychological needs are subjective in the sense that they are constructed in language and we can construct an infinite number of ways of describing human needs.  Psychological needs can only ever be 'seen' in statements about whether or not they are met. A need comes into existence when we notice if it is met or not met by a particular context.

And needs are culturally relative in the sense that they are statements about a particular context. We talk about needs when we are noticing a gap between the way things are and the way we would prefer them to be. For example, a woman might be listening to her husband lie about an affair and say to herself that she has a need for more honesty in the relationship.  Needs are a kind of self-reflective appraisal of the relationship between the self and the world.  In this example, the woman notices that she wants more honesty than her current circumstance provides.

So if psychological needs are subjective and context-dependent, what hope could ProSocial ever have of ever creating a world that works for all in the sense of meeting more psychological needs? Surely everybody is unique and what works for one will not work for another!

This objection misses the point in my view.  The fact that psychological needs are subjectively experienced makes it even more not less important to pay attention to psychological needs.  In every new context, every work meeting, every time a new person is appointed to a team, and every time a new collaborative challenge is faced, the ProSocial message is that we are tasked with re-establishing what really matters to the people involved so that we can better meet those needs. The more I work with groups, the more I realise that every single decision must be anchored in a strong sense of the needs of the individuals and the needs of the group as a whole.  Sometimes we can know what those needs are without asking, but often we overestimate how much we know about what others really want and need from a situation.

If you want to learn more about how I conceive of human needs, please see this blog (name the blog) where I integrate two approaches to understanding psychological needs that are, in a sense, diametrically opposed but which together offer a highly useful way of working with groups.  One approach emphasises their fluidity and context sensitivity, and the other emphasises their stability and universality. If you facilitate groups, I think it will help you to understand needs from BOTH of these perspectives so you can flexibly move between them as needed and combine them in skilful ways. For now, though, I want to explore the last, and perhaps most contentious aspect of my earlier statement - conscious evolution.

This is perhaps the most challenging part of the statement for many people, so I have tackled it last. You might think this is a vague, new-age way of speaking. But conscious evolution is at the heart of our vision as an organisation, and we want to bring science together with art, technology and spirituality to put flesh on the bones of this term.

Let us tackle the evolution word first. We have written elsewhere (INSERT LINK) about how evolution can occur in multiple streams. Evolution isn’t just about genetics and epigenetics, it is also about the processes of variation, selection and retention of individual behaviours and ideas (memes if you like), and it is continuously unfolding at multiple levels. Individuals evolve, groups evolve, cultures evolve, and even, potentially, humanity can evolve in its behaviour. When we say ‘evolve’, we don’t just mean ‘change’. We mean the Darwinian process of variation, selection and retention of behaviours in context. Let's unpack this idea.

Variation simply refers to the repertoire of behaviour. If we never try something, we can never learn if it is effective for our goals. So, generally, having a manageable amount of variation increases the rate of evolution. Variation is the raw material of evolution. Of course, just as in genetics, too much behavioural variation leads to chaos and dissolution. So the key is having just enough variation to produce adaptive change, while not so much that the system is overwhelmed and loses its integrity.

Selection of behaviour is at the heart of our method. For organisms without cognition, selection processes are relatively ‘blind’ and simple in the sense that those species that behave in ways that increase the chances of surviving to reproductive age are selected and retained. For humans, with the capacity to use language to imagine possible futures and compare those futures to possible pasts, the process of behavioural selection becomes vastly more complex. For a start, there are an infinite number of selection targets. My behaviour can be selected by my desire to finish this article, my desire to exercise, or any number of an infinitude of other possible things that might matter to me in this moment. So the ‘conscious’ part of ‘conscious evolution’ is the self-reflexive aspect of our awareness where we can observe what matters most to us by attending to the thoughts and feelings of our current experience. Some of us sense our goals for the moment and some into the sensations arising in our bodies. Either way, we ‘connect with ourselves’ in this moment, and we can bring our self-reflexive ability to choose into the moment. When we pause and ask ourselves ‘What matters most to me in this moment’ we can deliberately change the course of evolution of our behaviour from an automatic reaction to a more deliberate choice.

Behaviours are retained when they work to achieve a valued outcome. We tend to keep on doing what works in context. This can sometimes look odd to outsiders. Consider a father who constantly checks on their child’s whereabouts. He might do this out of a desire to keep the child safe and to express his care. For the child, this may behaviour may not work so well. It might feel controlling and might have the perverse outcome of making the child want to be even more distant from the father. But if the father’s behaviour is under the influence of the immediate burst of reassurance he feels when he learns where his child is, that reinforcement might outweigh the longer-term costs to the relationship.

This is why bringing ‘consciousness’ to our own evolution is so essential. Humans are unique in their capacity to go ‘meta’ on their own processes of reinforcement. We can look at our own behaviour, and discover what ‘turns us on’ and what causes us to move away in fear. We can plan possible futures that are different, and potentially more satisfying than our current environment.

Of course, this process is fraught, and when we exist in increasingly large groups as we do now, the impact of others' choices upon us can mean that we are constantly being thrown off what matters most to us. None of us has individually chosen to live in a world of increasing dread about the health of the planet and our capacity to survey as a species, but that is what we have achieved … collectively … together. We might blame executives who put profits before welfare or corrupt politicians, and certainly, such selfish individuals have been more influential in creating some of the crises we face. But no individual has the power to destroy the planet. That is a collective outcome from ways of thinking, feeling and being that lead to choices that feel good in the short term but come at the expense of the longer term.

So conscious evolution is about bringing deep, flexible awareness to the processes of our own behavioural and cultural evolution. That is why ProSocial places so much emphasis not just on the agreements we create (the Core Design Principles) but also on the flexibility and quality of our awareness of our context and values. What gives me hope is that, over and over again, I have seen that when people slow down enough to listen to themselves and others deeply, they make choices not just for the good of themselves but for the good of other living beings.

To learn more about ProSocial World and our mission click here.