Until a few decades ago, Latin American children grew up in a very different world. In my (Carolina Nieto’s) childhood, six to twelve children in a family shared almost everything, from food to television. Individual competition existed, of course, but it was so much less important, prioritizing collaboration. Our games were organized by rounds or turns, with no winners or losers; for example, we played quemados, a version of dodgeball in which each player took a ball and touched or “burned” another player, who, in turn, took the ball to “burn” the next one, and so the game went on, all playing together.

Nowadays, “first come, first served” dynamics predominate. The winner is the one who has more, and in more than games. We’re thinking of the serious stuff, that creates economic or social inequalities and rations out educational opportunities. In a world of champions and losers—but, above all, of “individuals”—everyone wants to know which side of the court they are standing.

Is there a way to bring back a more collaborative sense of how we play the game? More than a memory, might collaboration be the kind of knowledge that will help us move forward in the 21st century? Let's have a look.

When Prioritizing Collaboration, We Must Remember That We Have Not Always Preferred Individuality

Is the world becoming a stage for the “I” over the “we”? It would seem so: for more than half a century—as a study in Psychological Science found—the increase in individualism, traditionally associated with Western countries, may be a global phenomenon. To better understand the transition from the collective to the singular, these scholars drew a distinction between individualistic “practices” and “values.” On the one hand, “practices” are oriented toward describing people's life choices, such as the number of individuals with whom people share housing, the percentage of adults living alone, the number of people over 60 living alone, and the ratio of divorced and separated people to married people. On the other hand, “values” refer to established beliefs; among these, the researchers analyzed the perceived importance of friends versus family, the importance of raising children to be independent, and the preference for self-expression and freedom of opinion over other social commitments.

Read the full article about prioritizing collaboration by Carolina Nieto and David Mayoral at Stanford Social Innovation Review.