Cooperative Games for Peace Building
I delivered a lecture to a Peace and Justice Studies class at Cal Poly University last week on using cooperative games to build peace. We played games and talked about about social-psychology, history, and peace. Ultimately, the idea I was presenting is that cooperative games teach cooperation and cooperation builds peace.
The belief that cooperation leads to peace has been shared by scholars and sages throughout the ages. For example, Dwight Eisenhower (who led the D-Day invasion which catalyzed the end of World War) said: “Though force can protect in an emergency, only consideration, fairness, justice, and cooperation can lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.”
In a similar vein, Maria Montessori said: “Everyone talks about peace, but no one educates for peace. In this world, they educate for competition and competition is the beginning of war.”
In 1949, Morton Deutsch, social psychologist, World War II fighter pilot and pioneering scholar of peace and conflict studies, first published his Theory of Social Interdependence. In a nutshell, the Theory of Social Interdependence shows that cooperation, where people work together toward compatible goals in a spirit of interdependence, promotes prosocial peace-inducing behavior. Competition, meanwhile, has just the opposite social effects. In a word, it sows discord. Ultimately, the sensible notion that cooperation fosters peace is amply verified by the careful reasoning and vast body of evidence that underlie the Theory of Social Interdependence.
Beginning in the 1950’s, there have been a few peace educators and activists who advanced the notion of using cooperative games to build peace by instilling cooperative skills and mindsets. The oldest record of the idea appears in a 1951 monograph written by Ruth Cornelius, a first-grade teacher who worked with Theo Lentz, a peace researcher at Washington University. Cornelius observed the positive effect of the games on her students and extrapolated idealistically to imagining how cooperative games, in their cumulative impact if played en masse, could help usher in peace worldwide. In the 1960’s Stuart Brand introduced “new games”, a collaborative and peaceful alternative to traditional competitive games which Brand found militaristic and said modeled war. In the 1990’s Professor Arnold P. Goldstein, world-renowned social psychologist and expert on group aggression, studied and advocated for cooperative games as a tool for building peace by healing divisions among adversarial groups, such as gangs,
One of the beautiful things about cooperative games is their link to peace, including their utility as a peace-building tool. They can be used at all scales of social organization from the family to the school to far bigger and more discordant groups. Wherever people choose to work together so everyone can win, harmony is the natural result.
A student attending my talk was quite enthralled with these ideas. Her comments are below. She is evidently yet another example of someone who loves, and craves, working and playing with others in a spirit of mutual support and cooperation!
She said: “I will remember this week’s guest speaker for the rest of my life. Suzanne Lyons introduced the concept of cooperative games, which is something that I was unfamiliar with…I really strongly dislike competition. My sister loves board games and she’s very competitive. I couldn’t care less…I am a cheerleader because we don’t compete… Suzanne taught me that there can be cooperative games, which sound perfect to me…Towards the end, she presented a slide filled with cooperative board games. Now I have the best Christmas gift idea for my sister!”