[mellavora]

Odd, in most social animal species, the drive to be part of the group is stronger than the drive to exploit the group.

Of course, I'm arguing a tautology. And ignoring that while most animals in a social species are socially motivated, certainly some of them will 'cheat'.

[TeMPOraL]

The size of the group matters. Humans function well in small groups where everyone knows each other, and everyone must work together to survive (and then only if we ignore what happens to individuals that, due to character or a sudden health issue, can no longer pull their weight). But this doesn't scale past couple dozen people.

Meanwhile, the other strong drive that both humans and other animal species share is competition between the groups. Over the course of history, humans started to form groups of hundreds, then thousands, and eventually millions of people. In such groups, the drive to subdivide and compete dominates - the history of social development is one of inventing social technologies - cultural and legal mechanisms that keep those large groups whole and defeat our competitive instincts.

[omarfarooq]

> But this doesn't scale past couple dozen people.

Modern corporations contradict that claim.

[TeMPOraL]

No, they don't. They're strong evidence for the claim.

Corporations are strongly structured internally. They usually have a "spine" of bog-standard hierarchical organization[0], and some form of secondary, graph-like, functional organization, different in every big company. Like e.g. (roughly real structure, but fictional names):

- Hierarchical spine: I currently work for team Awesome, under business unit BU1, under department D1; I report to manager Eve (Awesome), who reports to Fred (BU1), who reports to Greg (D1) who reports to Helen (CEO).

- Secondary organization: My team (Awesome) closely works with teams Invincible (BU1) and Jazzy (BU2), all with slightly different reporting chains.

There are dozens other teams in the corporation and several more BUs. I almost never interact with them directly. My social cooperation instinct covers my team and other teams in the "secondary organization" section. Separation of responsibilities and complex structure prevents my team from actively competing with other teams - we either cooperate with them, or don't know they exist.

This is how corporations scale. If you want to see a scaled-up system demonstrating competitive tendencies, that's... the market itself. And it needs the strong, top-down, hierarchical regulatory system to prevent that competition from immediately turning bloody[1].

--

[0] - Which is the fundamental social technology we've invented that allowed us to scale the societies and build a civilization. It's why every large (> ~100) group of people you can find has some form of hierarchical governance.

[1] - As a social technology, the modern symbiosis between the market and governments is a marvel. It's by no means perfect, but the fact still is: we didn't just suppress our competitive tendencies while scaling societies up - we've harnessed them and put them to work, and it mostly turned out OK.

[omarfarooq]

True enough, I was incorrect to look at corporations from the outside, monolithically.

[PeterisP]

Social animal species with a strong drive to be part of the group are still quite happy to exterminate other groups of the same species. Just a random example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War , but there are many others in different species - illustrating that being socially motivated does not mean avoiding organized slaughter of your fellow species-mates.