Pro-Social Evolution Reset
Humans are hardwired for community, not selfishness — bonus culture and despair drag us away from our natural mode.
Pro-Social Evolution Reset is Collier's counter-argument to the 'people are naturally selfish' objection that his regional recovery prescriptions invariably face. His core claim: human beings are the most pro-social mammal in the class of mammals — more cooperative than chimpanzees, more group-oriented than any other species — because the communities that survived evolution were precisely the ones that learned to cooperate within the group. Selfishness is not our default; it is a mode we get dragged into by bad incentive structures (bonus culture) or by despair.
The practical implication is significant for policy design. Programmes that assume selfishness and design incentives to override it tend to produce selfish behaviour. Programmes that activate the pro-social instinct — pride in place, shared purpose, community belonging, productive work — tap a more powerful and more durable human motivation. The Cadbury's Bourneville model and the Mondragón cooperative are both examples of institutional design that activates the pro-social mode rather than designing around assumed selfishness.
Collier's diagnosis of left-behind places is also framed through this lens: decades of demoralisation have dragged communities from their natural pro-social mode into despair and isolation, which then produces the failure and apathy that outside observers mistake for character flaws. The policy error is diagnosing the symptom (despair) as the cause (lack of character), when the actual cause is the withdrawal of the conditions — pride, productive purpose, community — that sustain human pro-social behaviour.
- The evolutionary selection pressure for pro-sociality is stronger than for selfishness — communities that cooperated survived; those that didn't, didn't.
- Bonus culture and complete despair are the two main mechanisms that drag humans from their natural pro-social mode toward pure self-interest.
- Pride in place and productive purpose are the conditions that sustain pro-social behaviour — their absence explains the failure, not character deficiency.
- Institutions (cooperatives, community firms, mutual organisations) can activate and sustain the pro-social mode that markets and states often undermine.
- Appeals to solidarity are not idealistic — they activate a deeper evolutionary instinct than appeals to self-interest.
- Identify which institutions in your context activate vs suppress pro-social instinctsMap the incentive structures around you — bonus cultures, performance rankings, winner-take-all reward systems — and assess whether they are activating self-interest or pro-social behaviour. The answer shapes what interventions are feasible.Pro tipThe test is: does the institution reward people for outcomes the community cares about, or for metrics that can be gamed at community expense?
- Restore the conditions for pro-social behaviour before prescribing individual changeIf a community has been demoralised for 30-40 years, the pro-social instinct has been suppressed by despair. Prescribing individual effort in that environment will fail. Restore pride (by recognising the community's genuine history and skills), purpose (by creating productive employment), and belonging (by investing in community institutions) first.Pro tipCollier's Sheffield crucible example is the template: the community has a spectacular tradition — name it, celebrate it, build on it.WarningDo not conflate individual failure with community-level demoralisation — the causes and interventions are entirely different.
- Design incentive structures that reward community outcomesReplace bonus structures that reward self-interested deal-making with ones that reward community-relevant outcomes: employment, skills transfer, long-term firm sustainability. Cooperative governance is the strongest institutional expression of this.WarningHalf-measures — adding a community benefit clause to an otherwise extractive incentive structure — tend to be neutralised by the dominant incentive.
Teachers in South Yorkshire poor schools report that students tell themselves 'southerners think we're thick, so we must be thick — so what's the point in trying?' The descendants of crucible steelworkers who built the world's first factories have lost their sense of pride after 40 years of neglect.
Cadbury's Bourneville operation gave workers not just wages but housing, community institutions, and a sense that their firm had purpose beyond profit. Workers had pride, skill, and community belonging — all three conditions for sustained pro-social behaviour.
Every English region except London voted for Brexit. Collier reads this as a pro-social act gone wrong: communities expressing solidarity with their anger and using the vote as the only power they had, then being sold a lie by Boris Johnson about what that vote would deliver.
Collier developed this argument in 'The Future of Capitalism' (2018) as a response to the rational-actor assumption in economics that underpins both neoliberal policy and much of behavioural economics. His development economics fieldwork in the poorest countries showed that communities under extreme stress maintained extraordinary pro-social norms — mutual support, collective action, shared sacrifice — that rational-actor models cannot explain. He concludes that the evolutionary pressure for pro-sociality is older and stronger than the institutions (market, state) that claim to substitute for it.