ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY, 19(2), 179199 Copyright 2007, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Situating Coordination and Cooperation Between Ecological and Social Psychology

Reuben M. Baron
Department of Psychology The University of Connecticut

The major thrust of this analysis is to demonstrate the value of making ecological psychology more social while recognizing that for this to occur, social psychology must become more ecological in the sense that its key concepts must be treated in an embodied manner. I elaborate these propositions by focusing on establishing differences between coordination and cooperation. I then explore a range of relationships between them from a social psychological perspective. To accomplish this integration, which uses the commitment to reciprocity as a joint organizing principle, I use three complementary modelsdynamical systems, effectivities-affordances, and a rolerule model of social commitment. Key aspects of the analysis involve (1) elaborating the meaning of Turveys (1990) proper-relations view of coordination and (2) demonstrating the particular relevance of roles and trust as unifying concepts. From this perspective, coordinations occur between roles, rather than individuals, at the level of team play. Team play, in turn, is shown to depend on trust. And trust, in turn, is related to perceptions of dependability, thereby illustrating a critical intersection of ecological and social psychology.

The particular twist I would like to put on the theme of making ecological psychology more social and social psychology more ecological is to bring together a central concept from ecological psychologycoordinationwith a central concept from social psychologycooperation. I have chosen such a strategy because I hope to demonstrate that at its core coordination is a social phenomenon, and at its core cooperation is an embodied joint activity. In particular, I will attempt to demonstrate that social psychological concepts such as group, role, and trust are not

Correspondence should be addressed to Reuben M. Baron, Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269. E-mail: rmbaron@uconn.edu

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isolated phenomena whose study can be postponed until ecological psychology is ready. On the other side of the equation, I am equally convinced that the cognitivist, exchange theory approach to studying cooperation, personified by the Prisoners Dilemma (PD) paradigm, is a special case that ignores critical aspects of cooperation involving the self-organized emergence of joint actions designed to create mutually beneficial outcomes. It is also important to understand that when I claim that certain phenomena studied by ecological psychologists, such as coordination, are social at their foundation, I am not merely referring to issues involving the social psychology of experimentation (Van Orden & Holden, 2002). Rather, I will focus on demonstrating that certain aspects of sociality converge with certain aspects of coordination in principled and deep ways rooted in their sharing certain organizational problems that flow from their having to integrate in space-time multiple entities at multiple levels. I will begin with a social psychological analysis of coordination. I will then move on to showing the consequences of treating cooperation in an embodied way for establishing relationships between coordination and cooperation.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN COORDINATION AND COOPERATION Before beginning this analysis, it is necessary to briefly discuss the differences between coordination and cooperation and to clarify what it means to situate these terms between ecological and social psychology. Coordination in this context is at the level of finding or creating harmonious or synchronized patterns of relations between entities. Such relations may range from achieving synchrony between limbs either within or between people to more molar synchronies such as handclapping or dance steps between partners. In the standard ecological literature (e.g. Turvey, 1990), the study of coordination is an end in itself; in the present context coordination is a means to an end, that end being cooperation. For example, if the goal is to move a log that is blocking the road, cooperation requires working together to move that log. Although lifting the log may be more efficient if the lifting is highly coordinated between two or more people, of greater importance is getting the log moved through peoples joint efforts. That is, cooperation is goal- or outcome-driven. Given the above definition, what does it mean to situate these phenomena between ecological and social psychology? I propose that social and ecological psychology share a commitment to the same ordering principlereciprocity. In each domain, what is foundational is establishing that there is mutuality of effect or influence. For example, coordination involves reciprocity of part-part relations (e.g. limbs) and cooperation involves nesting part-part reciprocity in part-whole relations involving a social unit (e.g., teamwork or the problem of social synergy in Marsh, Richardson, Baron, & Schmidt, 2006). Thus, my general message is that

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just as animals select niches and niches select animals, so people select groups (or other people) and groups select people. Unpacking such reciprocity is the overriding goal of this article. The social constructs that I will introduce such as role and trust provide a scaffolding for understanding reciprocity.

TOWARDS A SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF COORDINATION Turvey (1990) defines the key problem of the study of coordination as bringing into proper relation multiple and different component parts (p. 938). I believe that at the heart of this elegant formulation is an implicit loan on sociality. Specifically, I will attempt to show that social concepts such as teamwork, role, and trust are in effect powerful ways of solving the degrees of freedom problem of coordination (the excess of independent variables) by establishing the meaning of proper relations. The applicability of such concepts is no accident, given that the core problem of social psychologythe interdependence or reciprocity relations of individuals and groupsinvolves similar sets of issues. Problems such as why individuals aggregate into groups and the consequences of grouping are problems of reciprocity. More generally, at issue is how individual goals or intentions can be coordinated or brought into proper relations with collective level goals. One approach to this problem is suggested by Hodges and Geyers (2006) values-realizing reinterpretation of the Asch conformity paradigm. The metaprinciple that they utilize is that action and perception seek values that lead to the integrity of the ecosystem as a whole (Hodges, this issue). In this case, the ecosystem is a behavior setting (Barker, 1968) that simulates a group performance-maintenance problem having to do with how to coordinate what appear to be conflicting valuescaring for the truth, caring for others, and caring that others care about truth (Hodges, this issue). Hodges resolution strategy turns what appears to be an error into caring for others and turns following into what might be attempts at leading. What this accomplishes is to shift the meaning of error and conformity from the experimenters a priori biases to asking what coordinations of values and actions best maintain the integrity of a group. Viewed this way, maintaining the integrity of a group is a special case of what a behavior setting does to ensure its survival. Moreover, in both cases, the resolution strategy can be viewed as (a) supplying a coordination strategy for proper relations between individuals and groups and (b) a way to master unruly degrees of freedom between individuals and groups. From this perspective, caring coordinates both individual and group perceptions and actions. Viewed thus, values as organizing principles derived from maintaining the integrity of an ecosystem provide a way of framing both the concerns of this article and Turveys (1990) invocation of proper coordination in a way that is neither arbitrary nor subjective. For example, there are proper and improper ways to turn a double play in

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baseball, depending on the dangers posed by another players charging into second base. Similarly, there are times to be competitive and times to be cooperative. And, there are times when for all its risks, trusting is foundational for reciprocity to work. For example, when uncertainty is high, it may make sense to trust a leader regarding what is a proper coordination (Schmidt, Christianson, Carello, & Baron, 1994). In each of these examples proper gets its meaning from those coordinations that will maintain the integrity of a system. Using Schmidt et al. (1994) as a model, let us see how a bridge can be built between Hodges reformulation of the Asch paradigm and Schmidts et al.s program of research into interpersonal coordination dynamics. Schmidts research is important to the present argument because it both replicates the effects of physical coordination parameters and demonstrates the moderation effects of social variables. More specifically, the results of Schmidt et al.(1994) can be reframed to bear on the meaning of proper relations between parts of a dyad. When pairs of subjects were created using a dominance scale it was found that more stable coordinations were found for the heterogeneous pairs (High-Low) than the homogeneous pairs (High- High; Low-Low). One way to interpret these results is that the leader-follower pairing offered dyads a more trustworthy model for shifting from a maintenance tendency to a magnet effect; that is, they traded individual preferences (maintenance) for achieving a stable social unit (magnet effect). More broadly, maintenance effects reflect the intrinsic dynamics of the component unitsa kind of proto-competitive dynamics whereas the magnet effects reflect an extrinsic dynamics that models cooperation (Turvey, 1990). In this context then, it could be said that the degrees of freedom were most efficiently organized by reciprocal as opposed to symmetrical role relations. That is, role provides a handy way to establish proper coordination between components of a dyad. Roles have differentiated functions associated with them that are proper for a person occupying that position. In this context, role involves a leader-follower relationshipthe most primitive of role differentiationsalbeit one that is highly useful in situations of high uncertainty. The idea of role regulation of coordinationsgroup-defined rules of reciprocitywill be elaborated in my discussion of the relationship between coordination and cooperation. First, it will be necessary to provide a treatment of cooperation that will mesh with the above conceptualization of coordination.

TOWARDS AN EMBODIED VIEW OF COOPERATION: GOING BEYOND THE PRISONS DILEMMA Fundamental to what I refer to as embodied cooperation are joint actions of organisms that operate on the environment to change it for mutual benefit, where that mutual benefit can range from short-term gains to having longer survival value for a cooperative unit such as a colony, hive, and so forth. For example, in Sherifs

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(1966) Robbers Cave study, conflicting groups of boys in a summer camp spontaneously work together to push a bus that has broken down off the road. Similarly, in Aschs (1952) example, people work together to remove a log that is blocking the road. The jigsaw paradigm (Aronson, Blaney, Stephan, Sikes, & Snapp, 1978) provides a way of conceptualizing why such actions occur. Specifically, in this paradigm, representatives of conflicting ethnic groups are put in a situation where each group has part of the information necessary to solve a problem. Joint action in the form of sharing of information is necessary to solve the problem. In this context, reciprocity becomes a proper strategy of conflict resolution. In each case, individually there is an insufficiency of information to solve the problem; that is, coordination provides outcomes that are superior to what can be achieved by one groups working by itself. It is this state of insufficiency or deficiency of the individual unit that is key to understanding how it is that the standard Prisoners Dilemma (PD) model of competitioncooperation yields a skewed view of cooperation. The PD approach begins with a basic postulate, the Nash Equilibrium (Nash, 1950), which generates the prediction that individualistic-selfish response strategies are rational and likely to predominate in short-term, mixed-motive situations. That is, players, when faced with choices involving cooperating with or betraying the other, typically chose a betrayal strategy (competition), given outcomes which range as follows; if both confess, 5 years in prison results (joint betrayal); if both players dont confess (cooperation), they get 2 years in prison. If, on the other hand, one confesses and the other doesnt,one goes free, the other gets 10 years (asymmetrical betrayal). In such situations individual self-interest, in the form of each picking a betrayal strategy, is predicted by the Nash Equilibrium. The model for such a competitive or Nash Equilibrium strategy is a situation where it is rational to take advantage of the other before they take advantage of you. This strategy is proper given the assumption the opponent cant be trusted; that is, cooperation is simply too risky a strategic move to unilaterally adopt in these circumstances. Such circumstances include not being able to communicate with the other in situations where the other is a disembodied payoff matrix. In this situation, decisions are a matter of inferences rather than observations of the others problems. Given these constraints, it is indeed rational for people not to give up an individualistic strategy. A bridge can be built to the coordination literature; people in coordination paradigms who persist in following their individually preferred state or rhythma maintenance tendencycan also be treated as exhibiting a Nash Equilibrium. Giving up or modifying ones rhythmic preferences to establish a joint rhythm is a symmetry-breaking event. Further, both PD and coordination research have typically been in situations that can be described as space-time circumscribed systems (R. C. Schmidt, personal communication, June 5, 2006). In line with Schmidts point, it could be argued that values and trust effects become more pronounced in situations that allow shared problems to emerge over time.

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Viewed thus, cooperation comes out of a state of joint insufficiency, as elegantly modeled by the jigsaw paradigm. In effect, what breaks down the Nash Equilibrium is evidence of the inadequacy of individual self-interest to solve pressing, adaptive problems. Instead of inferences regarding what the other is likely to do, we get perceptually verifiable evidence regarding what we each cannot do without coordinating ones actions with those of another organism.1 Instead of dynamics based on some invisible hand reasoning we turn to others for a helping handperception trumps inference. In sum, the PD-type situation is discontinuous as opposed to on-line and reflective as opposed to perceptually constrained. Players are isolated from one another with their metagoal being to see what I can get away with.

DIFFERING FORMS OF COOPERATION What I designate as embodied cooperation, on the other hand, is born out of earned trust. Such trust is all about reciprocity that is demonstrated on-line when, for example, a play is run. We treat cooperation as embodied in the flow of action; it is truly a social dynamics that capitalizes on coordinated movements that have a flow and trajectory to them. In such cases, we do not choose to cooperate; cooperation chooses us when field dynamics so dictate; that is, cooperation is perceptually driven in the Gestalt-sense of our seeking a social good figure, as when players perceive what must be done to complete a play. In the ecological context, cooperation is perceptually compelled rather than chosen as when it is disembodied.2 At issue are the collective consequences of spontaneously acting together to achieve goals nonrealizable as individuals. This contrasts sharply with the PD paradigm, where individuals decide to allocate outcomes in a competitive or cooperative manner. More broadly in the PD situation, cooperation is, in effect, a top-down choice. When cooperation is embodied, it emerges bottom up within the flow of coordinated action, with direct perception providing information regarding what joint actions are required (see Hodges, this issue, for a requiredness interpretation of values). When such perceptions occur in the context of a team sport, it is likely that players are no longer coordinating their actions as individuals; roles become the fo-

1A rationale for the existence of information that specifies this kind of abstract and temporally extended relation between the environment and other actors is provided by Schmidt (this issue) using Gibsons (1979/1986) example of the occluding edge as a model. 2The proposition that cooperation is compelled by field dynamics can be compared to people helping others in emergencies feeling morally obligated to act even when their own lives are endangered. Perhaps the most dramatic collective example is the Danish peoples evacuating their entire population of Jews shortly before the Nazis were to arrive.

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cus of the coordination. Roles in this context also reduce the necessity for complex decision making and thereby allow players to focus more readily on the information available in the stimulus array. Reciprocity of action is now hypothesized to be mediated by a group-level role structure. In basketball, for example, coordinations are between a point guard and a forward, each of whom earns trust by being in his or her proper place in the sequence of action. At this point we can speak of team play as embodied cooperation. Here we see the bridge between Schmidt et al. (1994), with its primitive role differentiation of leaderfollower, and the more complex role differentiations that occur in a complex group such as a sports team. But the basic point is the same; roles collect degrees of freedom from the players freelancing as individuals and put them into efficient organizations where everyone doesnt try to do everything. This, for me, is what proper orderings of parts and wholes are all about. Here coordination is a means, not an end; roles, not isolated actions, are coordinated. That is, the person is acting as a team member, doing teamwork. At this level of organization we can speak of embodied cooperation.

THREE MODELS FOR TREATING THE INTERPHASE BETWEEN COORDINATION AND COOPERATION In the course of trying to order the complex relations between coordination and cooperation I suggest three models of the interphase: (1) the formation of a self-organized, dynamical system reflecting circular causality; (2) the shifts in effectivities and utilization of new affordances that occur when aggregates assemble into groups, that is, the group as a tool structure; (3) the operation of a social-rule model oriented around Margaret Gilberts (1996) I to We model of joint commitment as the basis of forming a social unit and the consequences thereof. It is critical at this point to understand that these models are all necessary to capture the complexity of the coordination-cooperation relationship. In effect, each model is incomplete; together they complement each other. Our theoretical strategy is not either/or but rather this and that (Bois, 2006). Further, beyond the above multimodel approach to the coordination-cooperation relationship, I propose trust as a central player in all these models. I do this because, in so doing, I hope to establish the multidimensional nature of trust as both an antecedent and consequence of coordination and cooperation. The Dynamical System Model The proposition that coordination is embedded in team play can be unpacked in terms of the operation of a complex, dynamical system generated by the process of self-organization. From this perspective, coordination begins as a local dynamics that becomes self-organized, bottom-up into a global dynamics. What motivates this and the other models I discuss is a state of insufficiency in the relationship be-

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tween individuals and their environment. Viewed most broadly, in the course of the local dynamics of, for example, playing the game, individual players perceive that their individual response capabilities are no longer adequate to achieve important goals, leading them to explore other options. When this occurs at a collective levelthere is common information available regarding the insufficiency of the current environmentactions then become more interconnected leading to the transition from an aggregate to a team. This process of self-organization reflects a symmetry-breaking process whereby organisms shift from individual to collective action. I treat the shift to team play as breaking a Nash Equilibrium (Nash. 1950), in the sense that players abandon individualistic patterns of play when collective or coordinated action promises better outcomes. Symmetry-breaking in this context involves a phase transition or in Lewinian terms, an unfreezing process or qualitative change. This view of symmetry-breaking can be used to model everything from the formation of a slime mold (Garfinkel, 1987), to the formation of a wolf pack, to the formation of a study group. In sum, common reactions to individual states of deficiency lead to the emergence of a group structure bottom upa team is created that transforms coordinated individual actions into team play or cooperative action top down. That is, the emergence of a team creates what Campbell (1990) referred to as downward causation. The result is a self-organized, coordinative structurethe teamwhich reflects a relationship of circular causality between local and global dynamicsbetween coordination and cooperation. That is, local dynamics leads to the emergence of a global dynamics, which, in turn, modifies the local dynamics so that individual action is replaced by teamwork. Such coalitions may be fragile or uneasy (Kelman, 1997), resembling what Nicolis & Prigogine (1989) have referred to as far from equilibrium systems. Such systems can more easily adapt to rapidly changing environments. Further, in the social realm, far from equilibrium systems map on to what Granovetter (1973) has referred to as the strength of weak ties which is the opposite of highly cohesive, groupthink (Janis, 1972) types of organizations, that is, groups that stifle individual initiatives. Specifically, groups characterized by loose ties are better able to build bridges or connections to other groups. There are of course boundary conditions for such systems. In sports, for example, teams organized this way likely function better in fast break or breakaway situations, which are essentially opportunistic and require organizations that change on the fly. They may not do as well in half-court sets where stable plans of actions involving the discipline of set plays are necessary. In business, for example, there are environments where Apple types of organizations perform better than IBM types of organizations and vice versa. The earlier discussion of how a dynamical systems approach may be used to model the relationship between coordination and cooperation is important at two levels. First, it provides a dynamical analysis of the operation of team play as a way of looking at the coordination-cooperation relationship. Second, it shows the possible links between dynamical principles and the operation of social processes such

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as the differential effects of strong and loose ties. Further, once coordinations become embedded in team play the coordinations are between roles rather than between individuals (see the following section). Cooperation, Affordances, and Effectivities A second model involves understanding embodied cooperation in terms of affordance-effectivity relationships. Basically, the occurrence of cooperation as a bottom up process is elaborated by specifying changes in both effectivities and the pickup of affordances. This approach is, in effect, complementary to the dynamical systems type of model in the sense that it provides a functional context for self-organization. Specifically, the group is viewed as a functional unit that operates as a type of metatool that enhances individual response capabilities so as to make reachable affordances that couldnt be reached at the individual level. For example, the emergence of a slime mold affords the attainment of food supplies at a distant location. Similarly, being able to attack in a pack changes the edibility affordances of larger animals for wolves. That is, larger animals that would defeat individual wolves can now be attacked. At the human level examples abound. For example, students form study groups when reading assignments exceed individual capabilities. At the other extreme, individuals who are picked upon may join together to form a gang to protect themselves. Once formed in this way, cooperation typically involves a coordination of roles, as for example, in a study group when students divide up the material. In such cases, coordinations are means rather than ends; here we do not seek coordinations for the sake of being coordinated. We seek coordinations that (1) improve response capabilities through teamwork and (2) make available a greater range of affordances, be they edibility, winning in a team sport, or doing better on an exam. Most broadly dynamical processes of self-organization are clearly in the service of effectivities (enhancing capabilities) and the concomitant ability to utilize a wider range of affordances. Recent research by Richardson, Marsh, and Baron (in press) makes clear the formal similarity between extending response capabilities with a mechanical tool (regarding graspability or lifting) and the switch from one person to a two-person mode of joint grasping or lifting. In effect cooperation arises out of the formation of a social unit, given that being in a social unit changes the perception and utilization of liftability. At the most general level, Richardson et al. (2006) are moving toward a situation where two people are able to perceive what Mark (this issue) refers to as a collective affordance. For example, people recognize that as individuals they cannot lift a large log but with another person they can (Asch, 1952). Such reciprocal perceptions can, in turn, be seen as the basis for coordinated action in a goal-directed sequence. But although the perception of a collective affordance may constitute a necessary condition for joint action, is it sufficient? This brings us to another way of modeling cooperative action or joint activity.

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The Social Rule Model Gilbert (1996) provides a model of the coordination of individuals into a social unit that provides another way of looking at how social organization operates. She assumes that the formation of a social unit implies a joint commitment to that unit (Gilbert, 1996). The I has become a we. This we, however, is fragile at the dyadic level, given that nonreciprocating of any one member of the social unit dissolves the unit. For example, we cannot unilaterally change organized movement patterns and be a good team player. In effect, being a member of a social unit implies following certain rules revolving around what it means to be a responsible member of the social unit. Such rules flow from individuals becoming group members. In Gilberts terms, the I becomes a we. In this mode, we act as members of a social unit; we act as a body (Gilbert, 2005) and, as a member of that body, we take on certain obligations. Rules are principles that regulate social action within a social unit. Unlike laws, rules can be volitionally breached (Hodges & Baron, 1992) but at a price. If the rules breached are central to the proper operation of a social unit, be it a dyad or a group, the stability of the unit is threatened and people acting with the authority of the body can rebuke rule-breakers (see Gilbert, 2005). Like roles, rules help master degrees of freedom. For example, coordinations occur within certain bounds; only certain plays fit the game plan. Proper plays are those that are consistent with the collective values of the group. For example, a team that stresses defense uses a more restricted range of offensive plays. In sports there are rules associated with roles that embody coordinations. For example, a point guard is supposed to give preference to passing the ball before shooting it; for the team player, the I gives way to the we. Failure to follow rules has consequences at a number of levels. When a group, as opposed to a dyad, is rule regulated and group size is large, the deviant individual is likely to be dropped. That is, often occupants of role-organized systems are interchangeable at the group level; carrying out the role is crucial, not who carries it out. Indeed, in sports this becomes the basis of why one player is substituted for another. What is needed is the execution of the role-based coordination. At issue is whether people are enacting their roles properlythat is, performing the functions associated with their position in a social organization. It should be noted that, in this situation, proper performance of roles and rules as a scaffolding for cooperation implies a social deep structure whereby Gilberts (1996) social contract gets its force and its sense of obligation. At one level, rules are followed and roles performed because this facilitates the success of the group, for example, winning in a team sport. More generally, rules are means to realizing goals, which, in turn, may be the means for realizing values (Hodges, personal communication, July 30, 2006); one such value may be an evolutionary-based stricture against social cheating. Although I accept the general utility of such a formulation, which assumes that values are the standards by which goals and rules are evaluated (Hodges & Baron, 1992), I think it is necessary to locate values within certain environmental contexts. That is, values emerge to secure the integrity and

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maintenance of a particular behavior setting. Which values take the lead is from my perspective specific to a behavior setting, be it driving a car or confronting pressure from a group. From this contextual perspective, the impact of size needs to be examined if we are to understand proper relations among rules, roles and values. Barker (1968), for example, demonstrates that deviants are expelled from large groups whereas a small group attempts to reform them. Caporael and Baron (1997) provide a process analysis that proposes that different size groups provide different environments for the evolution and development of proper functions (p. 339). For example, micro-coordinations involving face-to-face interactions are likely with dyads including motherchild interactions, friendship formation, and sexual relations. With larger groups face-to-face coordinations are replaced by role-mediated interactions whereby nonverbal communication is embedded in a linguistic context. For example, the coordinations required among blockers, a passer, and a receiver in American football, a sport entailing large-group constraints, involve verbally mediated complex plays in addition to eye contact. On the other hand, dyadic coordination between a pitcher and catcher can utilize nonverbal cues or signs such as one raised finger meaning a curve ball or two raised fingers meaning a fastball, and so on. That is, baseball more readily decomposes to separable dyadic units than football.

TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF TRUST The concept of proper acting implied by role, in turn, takes us into a closer examination of a concept I consider crucial to the occurrence of human joint action at all levels of size: trust. I propose that it is trust that provides the glue for Gilberts (1996) I to We social contract, not merely the fear of being rebuked or being treated as an outsider (Gilbert, 2005). And it is trust that makes both individual and role-based coordination possible. Moreover, it is trust that gives coordination and cooperation a moral dimension, that is, the sense that certain ways of doing things are right and other ways of doing things are wrong. For example, it is clear that violating someones trust is wrong. That is, we rely on other people to act responsibly. This becomes another way to talk about what it means to act properly. Indirect support for the importance of trust is the vast literature that exists on the consequence of not living up to such obligations; that is, group sanctions occur when individuals engage in social cheating (Shackelford, 1997). Trust is the bridge or connection that allows coordinated actions to begin and to persist and trust is the scaffolding that links trajectories of goal-directed movement. In many sports the receiver has to be in the right place at the right time to receive a pass.3 In effect, people move to certain positions because they trust the other person to deliver the goods there. In baseball, for example, the pitcher trusts
3Hodges (personal communication, May 19, 2006) suggests that trust in this context resembles Gibson and Crookss (1938) observations about driving being done on faith.

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the catchers signs for a particular type of pitch, be it a fastball or a curve, etc. The catcher trusts the pitcher to follow his signs. Failure of such coordinations to occur can result in a wild pitch or injury to the catcher as when he expects a curveball and receives a fastball. Most importantly, trust is embodied in the anticipatory movements of the catcher. Moreover, the way trust changes coordination to cooperation in a given coordination sequence is by allowing mutually beneficial consequences to occur; for example, by the occurrence of patterns of action over time involving the pitchers striking out batters repeatedly. Trust, in this context, defines what is proper joint action, thereby implicating values in the sense that now we can go beyond distinguishing between a stable or unstable coordination. There are also right or wrong joint actions (Hodges & Baron, 1992). Given the role of trust, this moral dimension is entailed by a joint commitment to a relationship or a social units persisting over time.4 For example, in baseball, pitchers often have favorite catchers who are the only catchers they trust. Where there is a cooperative relationship that becomes long term, we have what might be called collaboration. Trust is now embodied in the strong reciprocity of the local social unit. This is not, however always good for the team because loyalty to a dyadic relationship might compromise the welfare of the team. For example, a preferred catcher may be a weaker hitter than the regular team catcher. This is another example of the negative effects of strong ties; within a group, a highly cohesive subunit can undermine intragroup cooperation between that unit and the broader entitythe team. The conflicts between different Muslim sects in Iraq undermining unity at the level of the country is this principle scaled to another level. That is, if the sects were less internally cohesive, bridges between sects become more possible. Trust also provides support for the proposition that ecological psychology has taken a loan on sociality. It can be claimed, by way of further generality of my treatment of trust, that trust is what allows experimental studies of coordination to work. For example, trust in the experimenters instructions gets the coordination to occur in the first place. Further, the findings of Schmidt et al. (1994) that Hi-Lo pairings were more stable than Hi-Hi or Lo-Lo pairings could reflect greater collective trust in the leader-follower condition. That is, it may be hypothesized that trust is more highly reciprocated in this condition. This study is of particular interest because trust can be said to be embodied in the social unit. Indeed in the Hi-Lo condition a kind of magnet effect may have occurred with the social unit functioning as an attractor for coordination. In this context it should be noted that the hysteresis effect found by Richardson et al. (in press), whereby participants persist in joint lifting well beyond when they physically need the other person, can be interpreted as the social unit becoming a strong attractor. For example, the motivation for
4Gilbert (2005) accepts the potential relevance of a moral dimension but treats such effects as external to joint commitment. I argue that trust and hence a moral dimension is intrinsic to a joint commitment.

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turning to another person may shift from a physical need for help to enjoying the jointness of the activity. Further, recent research (Brooks, King-Casas, et al., 2005) suggests that trust does more than moderate motoric coordinations. Using MRI brain scan techniques, reciprocal changes in areas of brain activity were found to track trusting exchanges in a simulated business transaction involving repayments of invested money. Specifically, there was correlated activity in the middle of the cingulate cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex between and within persons. (The brain area involved was the dorsal striatum.) Trust, in the context of coordination, can function as both an extrinsic and intrinsic control parameter. Extrinsically, as an environmental trigger, a certain level of trust is needed to get subjects to pass through a phase transition such as switching from working alone to working cooperatively (Richardson et al., in press). Intrinsically, trust as the product or the output of successful coordinations can become an input to new cycles of joint, self-organized activity. In the more traditional language of variables, trust is both a moderator and a mediator. As a moderator, it strengthens or weakens relations between other variables, for example, coordinative relations (Baron & Kenny, 1986). As a moderator it can operate at both local and global levels. At a global level, for example, trust can be a climate or zeitgeist as in the Middle East where the social climate has changed from mild trust to strong distrust, thereby dampening the possibility of cooperation occurring in the form of peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis. Wearing its other hat as a mediator, working trust can transform negative attitudes to positive ones, opening people up to negotiations (Kelman, 1997). Here trust makes it possible to overcome barriers.

THE FRAGILITY OF TRUST For all its importance trust is fragile connective tissue. It is never a final state of affairs; it perpetually needs to be earned. Specifically within the trust literature, it appears that trust itself is subject to hysteresis: (1) it is easier to destroy trust than to create trust (Kramer & Carnevale, 2003; Lewicki & Weithoff, 2000); (2) it is easier to create trust than to restore it once it is lost. Trust may be fragile because it is working against the intrinsic strength of the maintenance tendency; it pushes people to exchange independence for the benefits of being part of a social unit. That is, individuals become role players who accommodate to the team. Viewed this way, trust prevents the intrinsic dynamics of individual preferences from re-emerging. In this sense, competitive tendencies never completely go away. They are compromised by the existence of trust which I propose is the foundation of team play. My further claim is that trust is highly complex because it is more than embodied, proper joint action. What develops over time with trust is that people begin to share emotions or have feelings in common (Kadar, personal communication, March 8, 2006). That is, to be in a trusting relationship is to come to share a com-

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mon outlook. It is also likely that having a common outlook or definition of the situation will facilitate trust. In particular, Kelman (1997) uses his conflict resolution workshops between Palestinians and Israelis to create an interphasing of commonality of outlook and working trust. Specifically, Palestinians and Israelis are asked to jointly come up with recommendations to overcome barriers to peace talks. The idea of overcoming barriers jointly harkens back to Sherifs (1966) Robbers Cave intervention where a broken down bus had to be moved jointly.

HOW THE GROUP CAN BE IN THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE GROUP Perhaps the best case for the foundational nature of trust is that it helps us understand how the individual can be in the group and the group in the individual. Specifically, the duality structure rests on there being reciprocity between the individuals commitment to the group and the groups commitment to the individual. This joint commitment is a way of understanding the level of cohesiveness in a group. In the present context this becomes a means of better understanding how team play comes about. When a group is team-oriented players trust each other and the coach, in turn, trusts the players. Ironically, when social bonds are based on trust we make ourselves vulnerable because we count on others to act responsibly (Levin, 2007). However, in team-oriented groups there is an acceptable risk that our actions will be appropriately reciprocated, be they a pass in a sport, a business investment, or a simple limb movement to establish a joint, comfortable tempo of action. Coordinations in such groups flow from joint commitments that are earned, not ordained. It is trust that makes this type of interdependence work. And it is the lack of trust that makes groupthink so deadening. Why? Because when group-level trust is low, the executive structure must then pay the price of constantly monitoring behavior for compliance to rules. In groupthink-type organizations, actions, including coordinations, are tightly scripted. On-line creativity is not permitted. Another way to say this is that in loose-tie groups where trust underlies the nature of the bonding, there is room for the individual to be both part of a group and yet retain individual degrees of freedom. In effect, such groups are successful because there is an ever-shifting figure-ground relationship between maintenance and magnet effects, between individual creativity and social obligation. In sports, such a team is equally effective in fast-break opportunities where individual creativity is important and half-court sets where disciplined team play is necessary. In such organizations, who performs what role is also flexible. Indeed, when Larry Bird was the member of the Boston Celtics basketball team, there emerged a flexible role organization that allowed him to create a new position, a point forward. That is, Bird was a frontcourt player who on occasion took over the backcourt function of making passes and running the team. This could only work with a very

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high level of trust among team members. In such groups, it may be said that roles have fuzzy boundaries. Roles with fuzzy boundaries, in turn, provide a mechanism for reconciling individuality and groupness.5 In sum, groups that are structured around trust trade the predictability of groupthink for flexibility and organizational charts for on-line shifts in organization. In such groups one cannot hide behind roles; even the leadership structure must earn the trust of the players or employees as the case may be. In such groups, climate is more than a matter of context; it is self-organized and emergent. Thus, we can speak of a particular group as having a cooperative as opposed to a selfish climate. Going back to the language of Caporael and Baron (1997), this climate then becomes the environment within which members establish coordinations and carry out proper functions. To be specific, members of a study group thusly structured will continue to work jointly even after the exam period is over. In effect, a task-oriented basis of group organization may persist even when its task is completed. Finally, up until now, I have eschewed a formal definition of trust, depending rather on seeing it as an assemblage of functions rooted in reciprocity. In order to demonstrate that trust is more than a convenient theoretical construct, we begin the task of specifying when and how the presence of trust can be known.

DEPENDABILITY AND PROTO-TRUST In order to understand how trust entails reciprocity, I propose it is necessary to see how trust is linked to interdependence in the sense that the context for trust is a state of collective vulnerability or joint need. Given this joint need, I propose that people search for others who can be perceived as dependable. Such a person, in the language of negotiations, is seen as an honest broker. More specifically I suggest that dependability, in this context, is a kind of incipient or proto-trustliterally a search for another person worthy of trust. The provisional nature of trust at this point is also indicated by Kelmans (1997) term working trust. I prefer the term dependability in this context for a number of reasons, beginning with an assumption that it is easier to conceive of dependability as an embodied state of affairs, as for example, a way of doing things that indicates the reliability of the occurrence of that action. Further, I suggest that dependability so conceived can be treated as a social affordance that fits Runeson and Frykholms (1981) Kinematic Specification of Dynamics (KSD) principle. That is, I propose that dependability can be embodied in patterns of action that can be tracked perceptually. For example, I hypothesize that there can be information that specifies an intent to be
5This interpretation of roles may also be framed in terms of the degrees of freedom problem. Specifically, the Larry Bird move converts the noisiness of individuality into a group strengthening reconfiguration of roles. That is, individualizing roles may be said to create pink noise in the Van Orden, Holden, & Turvey (2005) sense.

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dependable. Dependability also likely fits Marks (this issue) conception of a common affordance. For example, if I need help with my car when it doesnt start and I can rely on my neighbor to either give me a jump start or give me a lift to work, and I do the same for him, we have what I would designate as a joint affordance for dependability in the car realm. When this joint affordance becomes embedded in a more complex social relationship, for example, we carpool regularly, I would move from labeling the relationship as dependability to referring to it as one involving trust.

TRUST AS A RELATIONAL CONCEPT In effect, joint dependability scales up to trust when it becomes part of a committed relationship that evolves over time. Within such a relationship one cannot in good faith breach this social contract unilaterally. In my earlier terms, when dependability involves more than two Is occasionally helping each other, that is, when it is part of a We relationship, I suggest that we use the term trust. More generally then, trust is a social construction that is grounded in joint affordances of dependability. Trust so construed makes proper social coordinations possible (Hodges & Baron, 1992); it is a hedge for our vulnerability. To further appreciate my proposal that dependability scales up to trust in a committed relationship, it is necessary to move beyond the dyadic example. Here I am following the logic of Caporael and Barons (1997) evolutionary analysis of the relationship between increases in group size and changes in the proper functions of social units. I have, in effect, anticipated this treatment of trust in my discussion of role-based coordination. Within this view of role-based relations, trust becomes an even more crucial concept. Indeed, this is the essence of what team play is all about. For example, dependability refers to what another person will do as an individual playerhe/she is a dependable rebounder or shooter. Trust refers to what this player will do in the framework of a team or organization. Indeed the failure of American-trained basketball players to play as a team has undermined the success of U.S. teams in international competition against European teams who are less talented but do play as a team. Recently, a professional basketball player in the United States, Stephon Marbury, who had such problems, said it best: We dont trust Coach, and Coach does not trust us (Bergen Record, April 18, 2006). Note in particular the reciprocal focus of Marburys statement. This firsthand report is consistent with my proposition that trust is best understood as a collective-level concept. Trust is clearest and most necessary at the level of part-whole relations within a group, as opposed to part-part relations. Viewed thus, trust becomes an index of the joint commitment of the group to the individual and the individual to the group. This index gives us a way of understanding the cohesiveness of a group, what I earlier referred to as a possible order parameter for a group organization (Baron, Amazeen & Beek, 1994). Specifically, in this view, trust emerges

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out of such temporally extended joint commitments and is what makes possible such joint commitments. As an antecedent state, this constitutes Kelmans working trust and as a product of such jointly committed relationshipsor systems of role-based coordinationswe have what might be referred to at a collective level as a climate of trust. This climate of trust, in turn, reflects a dynamic tension between a majority faction (forces toward order) and a minority faction (forces toward disorder). At a molar level this becomes another way to understand trust. It is also here that we can see why fragility may be an asset. At a collective level, what keeps a group honest is the presence of an active minority faction or in dynamic terms, a secondary attractor. Further, a climate of trust can be understood as a collective affordance applying to groups, communities and even niches. Viewed this way, our analysis has preceded from dependability, a property of individual parts, to trust in a dyadic, committed relationship (part-part relations) to trust within a larger grouppart-whole relationswhere we speak of a climate of trust. At the level of proper functions, dependency-trust differs somewhat at different sizes of the social unit as follows: (1) Dependability allows people to know whom to call on for what. Here the coordinations are largely of informational resources. (2) Trust as part of a committed relationship requires a collaborative coordination over time for an ongoing project. The existence of the unit depends on a We- level reciprocity of actions. (3) When whole-part relations are the focus, intragroup relations not only affect internal relations within the group but also have implications for intergroup relationsfor example, the ability to form bridges of trust with other groups. (4) Trust, viewed as a climate, not only works at the small-group level but can pervade a cultural context or zeitgeist as in the Middle East (Baron, 2003). It should be noted that when I talk of climate I am staying within a tight dynamical framework. Specifically, I regard this climate effect as an emergent structure generated by the same, circular dynamic process I described earlier; however, the units are social groups rather than individuals. This pattern of circular causality can be illustrated in the following example. Local group interactions lead to the emergence of a climate of distrust in the Middle East. This climate of distrust, in turn, undermines small-group peace negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis. For example, the Kelman-type of conflict resolution workshops are no longer being run. In this regard I see what I am doing with trust as consistent with what Iberall (1987) has done in terms of deriving macro-units such as the origin of civilizations from micro-level dynamic origins.

MIXED-MODE SOCIAL KNOWING REVISITED I have up until this point largely ignored the epistemological issues raised by my treatment of trust. In general, I assume that trust-like phenomena are informationally specified when specific interactions are taking place be they within

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or between groups. For example, Kean (2000) has demonstrated that observers can perceive whether other people, based on point light information alone, are engaging in cooperative or competitive joint actions. Such data suggest that trusting relations can be transparent perceptually in certain reciprocal actions. For example, it can be assumed that perceptions of trustworthiness influence online interactions such as that between a pitcher and a catcher involving the communications of nonverbal signs. In this context, perceptions of trust are also reciprocally transparent in the sense that an observer could view such sequences and discern which pitchercatcher dyads were high in trust (see Marks, this issue, for studies of others intentions consistent with this line of reasoning). Such interpretations can be tested. I propose looking at videos of interacting groups to ascertain whether it is possible to perceive variations in level of trust when only nonverbal information is available. Fortunately, Kelman (1997) has videos available of such groups with and without voice, allowing the possibility of directly testing this kind of hypothesis. Epistemologically, however, the situation is more complex. Thus, although I generally agree with the strategy of ecological psychology to push perceptualgrounding as far as possible, I have long felt there needs to be openness to less pure epistemic processes in regard to social knowing (cf. Baron, 1980, 1981). For example, Baron and Boudreau (1987) proposed that depending on the opportunities for direct observation and/or the availability of embodied information, social affordances may be directly perceived, inferred or involve a mixture of perception and inference. Recent work by Dunbar provides an evolutionary rationale for when one has to invoke categorical processes. For example, Dunbar (1993) proposes that as group size increases, face-to-face contacts become more limited, which, in turn, leads to the development of linguistically-based categorical processes. Another way to frame this problem is to build on the concept of a social Pi-number as proposed by Marsh, Richardson, Baron, and Schmidt (2006). Although they introduced this concept in the context of understanding when individuals will shift from solo to joint lifting, I suggest extending this concept to epistemic matters. Specifically, I propose we look at the possibility of a social knowing Pi-number for when we shift from direct perception to category-based inference, or for that matter in Neissers (1976) term, category-based perception. (See, however, Schmidt, this issue, for a unitary model of perception that would treat trust as having long-term event properties and hence, being directly perceivable.) In principle then, if the shift from individual to joint action involves a response to deficiencies in the physical environment, why not assume that informational problems have the same effect? For example, the formation of a study group may be seen as generating distributed cognition as a response to individual level information overload. In on-line situations when sharings are not possible, going beyond the information given (Bruner, 1957, p. 41) may occur cognitively at the individual level. Coming back to trust as the property to be known within social interaction, I propose that trust may be directly perceived, or perceived up to a certain point and then augmented cognitively, what I have referred to previously as

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mixed-mode processing. On the other hand, I find it easier to assume that dependability can be directly perceived, particularly in light of research that demonstrates that caring as a mode of carrying can be informationally specified (Hodges & Lindhiem, 2006). Finally, perhaps dependability fits the paradigm of a social affordance to be discovered, whereas trust is emergent within the social interaction process (Stoffregen, 2000). That is, trust is less a state of a person and more a state of affairs between two or more people that is a work in progress.

CONCLUSIONS The reader should now be able to understand why I proposed that coordination and cooperation can be situated between ecological and social psychology. This strategy has in effect involved unpacking Turveys (1990) proper relations interpretation of coordination. The unifying thread in my analysis has been the proposition that social psychology is also concerned with the problem of establishing proper relations between parts (e.g., dyads) and part-whole relations (individual-groups). Disparate concepts such as roles and trust have been harnessed to try to establish a functional basis for the meaning of proper relations. Hopefully, this analysis will make clear why we can no longer postpone a collaboration between social and ecological psychology. Furthermore, the introduction of constructs such as role, trust, and the strength of weak ties does not introduce unruly degrees of freedom. On the contrary, if treated in the embodied, dynamical way I suggest, they, in Turveys (1990) terms, will help us master degrees of freedom. When this occurs, cooperation will no longer just be an isolated phenomenon to be studied; it will also describe the relationships between ecological and social psychology.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Preparation of this article was supported by National Science Foundation Grant BSC-034802, awarded to Kerry L. Marsh, Claudia Carello, Reuben Baron, and M. L. Richardson. Portions of this paper were presented at the Thirteenth International Conference on Perception and Action, Monterey, CA, July 10, 2005, and at a colloquium for the Psychology Department, University of Portsmouth, UK, in September 2006. I acknowledge the helpful comments and suggestions of Bert Hodges, Harry Heft, Richard Schmidt, and Joan Boykoff Baron on earlier drafts of this article.

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