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Dugnad: A Fact and a Narrative of Norwegian Prosocial Behavior

  • Cultural and Behavioral Systems Science
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Abstract

Evolved mechanisms of phenotypic plasticity, which are evolutionary processes in their own right, enable species to respond adaptively to their environments. The Scandinavian countries, and Norway in particular, have for many years scored exceptionally high on lists of life quality, economic indicators, and measures of happiness. We propose that learning prosocial and cooperative behavior, which is central in a particular Norwegian cultural practice, dugnad, plays a role in the country’s success story. Dugnad is a Norwegian term for a type of voluntary work carried out as a community or collective and traditionally involving a social gathering. Dugnad has a long history in Norway, and it is a well-established cultural practice that has led to and still maintains significant social benefits. Dugnad is arranged in virtually all communities such as kindergartens, neighborhoods, schools, and organizations. Participation in dugnad gatherings is generally expected. Children from a young age are involved in dugnad. Dugnad activities are based on cooperation and can include anything from arranging a spring cleaning in the local community to building a club house for your children’s sports club. This paper discusses dugnad as a cultural practice that creates an environment that nurtures prosocial and cooperative activities. From a behavior analytic, selectionist perspective, we propose a non-domain-specific learning mechanism for dugnad-typical prosocial and cooperative behavior analogous to the phylogenetic evolutionary mechanism of group selection. Contingencies can lead to and maintain dugnad activities when extended behavioral patterns are selected as wholes.

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Notes

  1. Online source without page numbers that we edited for grammar.

  2. In the following, we omit italics when referring to the cultural practice of dugnad, instead of the term dugnad.

  3. We omit “a constellation of values [and] attitudes” (Biglan, 2015, p. 16), which are part of both of Biglan’s definitions, but which we regard to be inseparable from behavior.

  4. Further vocabulary that Glenn et al. (2016) specifically developed for describing cultural selection processes includes metacontingency, macrobehavior, macrocontingency, culturo-behavioral lineage, culturant, and cultural cusp. Our analyses are compatible with processes that might describe such a cultural level of selection (see Krispin, 2016, 2017, for an application of the metacontingency vocabulary). However, a conceptualization of dugnad as a result of cultural level selection in terms of metacontingencies would here distract from our goal to outline the contribution of natural and operant selection to the cultural practice of dugnad. An analysis in terms of these cultural selection concepts seems inept for our present purposes of 1) discussing the contribution of operant selection of less-extended acts to the maintenance of the cultural practice of dugnad and 2) suggesting that, in dugnad participation, both selection of temporally extended behavior of individuals and that produced by several group members together is likewise selected by PIEs.

  5. We regard so-called altruistic behavior and prosocial or cooperative behavior as gradually different in their cost-benefit distribution and in the temporal distance between the cost and the benefit, but not as different in kind. Prosocial and altruistic behavior would be categorically different only if altruistic behavior were defined as nonreinforced behavior—a definition that would defy behavior analysis (Rachlin & Locey, 2011).

  6. This is not to claim that inheritance of altruistic tendencies is impossible or to deny that babies are more likely to reinforce the behavior of a person they have observed to cooperate (which Biglan, 2015, uses as evidence of “wired-in tendencies” [p. 16]). However, here we would like to spread hope by outlining how prosocial behavior can be learned just as we can learn self-control (Locey, Jones, & Rachlin, 2013).

  7. Note that paying your share for the skip is independent of your actual dugnad participation. Carrying the washing machine is part of participation, but both activities are independent of whether it was you who “disposed” of the washing mashing by placing it in front of the exit in the first place.

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Acknowledgements

We thank David Sloan Wilson, Anthony Biglan, Ingunn Sandaker, Nina Witoszek, Kalliu Carvalho Couto, and Asle Fagerstrøm for their review and feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

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  1. Department of Psychosocial Health, University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway

    Carsta Simon

  2. Department of Behavioral Science, OsloMet—Oslo Metropolitan University, PO Box 4, St. Olavs plass, NO-0130, Oslo, Norway

    Carsta Simon & Hilde Mobekk

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Simon, C., Mobekk, H. Dugnad: A Fact and a Narrative of Norwegian Prosocial Behavior. Perspect Behav Sci 42, 815–834 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40614-019-00227-w

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