Washington's Law of Cooperation
Updated 2026-07-31
INTRODUCTION
English translation pending.
CORE DEFINITION
Washington's Law of Cooperation holds that as the number of people collaborating grows, individual responsibility is diluted and coordination costs climb, so overall efficiency may fall rather than rise. It corresponds to the proverb about three monks and no water, and to the documented phenomena of social loafing and free riding. The qualifier is identifiability: cooperation scales well when individual contributions remain visible and attributable, and degrades when they do not.
SCAFFOLDING EFFECT
Reduce cognitive load
- Sizing rule: add people only when contribution stays attributable, not by default - Design lever: make each person's output visible and measurable to counter diffusion - Diagnosis shift: read coordination failure as a structure problem rather than a motivation problem
Anchor fast decisions
When group size grows, any one person's effort becomes harder to observe, so the expected cost of slacking falls and effort declines. At the same time, the number of pairwise communication links grows faster than headcount, so coordination consumes more of the time that would otherwise go to work. The two effects compound, and free riding hides inside the noise of collective output.
MINIMUM ACTION
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Source support: Explicit
- wiki.mbalib.comhttps://wiki.mbalib.com/wiki/%E5%8D%8E%E7%9B%9B%E9%A1%BF%E5%90%88%E4%BD%9C%E8%A7%84%E5%BE%8Bverified
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