Many situations in human life present choices between (a) alternatives beneficial to an individual and (b) alternatives that are less beneficial to the individual, but could be beneficial if chosen by many individuals. Choices of the latter alternative are generally considered cooperative. Taking the supposition that a lack of cooperation between and amongst societies lies behind many crises of the 21st century as its point of origin, the paper takes a two-step approach to shed light on the Nordic cultural-evolutionary puzzle of managing to maintain a dynamic equilibrium between competition and cooperation. First, the paper suggests cooperation as a valuable temporally extended pattern of behavior that may be learned and maintained over an individual’s lifetime. Second, the paper examines how Norwegian and Swedish culture fosters a commitment to extended patterns of cooperative behavior. By means of interpreting successful Scandinavian cultural characteristics in the light of selection of behavior both during phylogeny and during ontogeny, the paper derives hypotheses about functional relations between behavioral and environmental events that make for the success of the Nordic nations and which might inspire policy development in other countries.

中文翻译：

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为什么挪威人不在森林里养猪：启迪北欧的“合作”艺术

人类生活中的许多情况都在 (a) 对个人有益的替代方案和 (b) 对个人不利的替代方案之间做出选择，但如果由许多人选择，则可能是有益的。后一种选择的选择通常被认为是合作的。假设社会之间缺乏合作是 21 世纪许多危机背后的根源，本文采用两步方法来阐明北欧文化进化难题，即设法保持动态竞争与合作的平衡。首先，该论文建议将合作作为一种宝贵的时间扩展行为模式，可以在个人的一生中学习和保持。第二，该论文研究了挪威和瑞典文化如何促进对扩展合作行为模式的承诺。通过根据系统发育和个体发育期间的行为选择来解释成功的斯堪的纳维亚文化特征，本文得出了关于行为和环境事件之间的功能关系的假设，这些关系有助于北欧国家的成功，并可能激发北欧国家的政策制定。其他国家。