- By Elizabeth Weaver
Join me and the Neuroscience community both here in Atlanta and nationwide in celebrating Brains & Behavior Faculty Walt Wilczynski & Sarah Brosnan’s new book: Cooperation and Conflict: The Interaction of Opposites in Shaping Social Behavior; published by Cambridge. (1)
Understanding the interaction between cooperation and conflict in shaping effective social behavior is a fundamental challenge facing societies.
Walt Wilczynski, Ph.D.
In their new edited book, Brosnan and Wilczynski, along with their authors, explore both the exciting new directions and the biggest challenges in their fields, while focusing on identifying commonalities across species and disciplines to help understand what features are shared broadly and what are limited to specific contexts.
Although seemingly opposite in nature, the authors present a complex and sophisticated, interdependent and mutually beneficial relationship between cooperation and conflict. According to Brosnan: “One of the biggest insights of the book was that essentially all of our authors independently argued that cooperation and conflict are not opposites, but are inextricably linked, an insight that spans every discipline represented in the book.”
Sarah Brosnan, Ph.D.
Drawing on the strong interdisciplinary expertise here at Georgia State University, the book’s origins can be traced back to a metaphorical seed planted in 2013 during the initial years of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience. Several faculty, spearheaded by Director Elliott Albers and the late Walt Wilczynski, and including Brosnan, Tricia King, Diana Robins, Michael Beran, and Bill Hopkins wrote a Templeton grant(2) in hopes of exploring prosocial behavior and oxytocin from an interdisciplinary perspective.
After years of interdisciplinary research on the grant, Sarah Brosnan from Psychology and Walt Wilczynski from Neuroscience took the lead on editing a book that incorporated the main themes of the group’s research, deciding to focus on the balance between cooperation and conflict.
As their project developed, both authors felt it was important for the content to be broader than originally imagined in order to make clear the commonalities across disciplines. Their interdisciplinary approach led to authorship by geneticists, political scientists, social psychologist, biologists, neuroscientists, and behavioral ecologists, just to name a few. GSU is well represented in chapters throughout the book, including content from Elliott Albers, Heather Caldwell and Bill Hopkins from Neuroscience, Rob Latzman from Psychology, and Bill Long from Political Science.
Key to Wilczynski and Brosnan’s vision was that the breadth of perspective on the subject be coupled with accessibility across these disciplinary boundaries. Thus, they created a book in which experts from biology to political science explain the exciting new directions in the field at a level accessible to students and researchers from different backgrounds, asking their authors to write to non-specialists and including text boxes that explain material that is essential to understanding each discipline’s terminology and theoretical underpinnings.
Brosnan adds : “We didn’t want this to be a book that only experts could use; our goal was a volume that would encourage researchers to consider how their approaches fit with those of other disciplines, and for students and non-specialists to benefit from the collected knowledge.”
As we navigate an increasingly complicated and interconnected society, the timing of a book focused on conflict and cooperation couldn’t be more felicitous.
We would like to dedicate the announcement of this book to the late Walt Wilczynski, Ph.D., an author, a friend, a colleague, a director, a partner, a runner, a true example of cooperation amongst complexity, a natural resource of information, and so much, much more.
- Wilczynski, W., & Brosnan, S. (Eds.). (2021). Cooperation and Conflict: The Interaction of Opposites in Shaping Social Behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108671187.
- Albers, H.E. (PI) The Prosocial Brain: Evolution of the Human Capacity for Empathy, Compassion and Cooperation, The John Templeton Foundation, 40463, July 1, 2013 – June 30, 2016, $3,382,664 (Total).