[Most people care what others think of them. In many situations,
that can be leveraged for the common good. ]
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THE SECRETS OF COOPERATION  
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Bob Holmes
March 29, 2023
Knowable Magazine
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_ Most people care what others think of them. In many situations,
that can be leveraged for the common good. _

, Maria Hergueta

 

People stop their cars simply because a little light turns from green
to red. They crowd onto buses, trains and planes with complete
strangers, yet fights seldom break out. Large, strong men routinely
walk right past smaller, weaker ones without demanding their
valuables. People pay their taxes and donate to food banks and other
charities.

Most of us give little thought to these everyday examples of
cooperation. But to biologists, they’re remarkable — most animals
don’t behave that way.

“Even the least cooperative human groups are more cooperative than
our closest cousins, chimpanzees and bonobos,” says Michael
Muthukrishna [[link removed]], a behavioral
scientist at the London School of Economics. Chimps don’t tolerate
strangers, Muthukrishna says, and even young children are a lot more
generous than a chimp.

Human cooperation takes some explaining — after all, people who act
cooperatively should be vulnerable to exploitation by others. Yet in
societies around the world, people cooperate to their mutual benefit.
Scientists are making headway in understanding the conditions that
foster cooperation, research that seems essential as an interconnected
world grapples with climate change, partisan politics and more —
problems that can be addressed only through large-scale cooperation.

Behavioral scientists’ formal definition of cooperation involves
paying a personal cost (for example, contributing to charity) to gain
a collective benefit (a social safety net). But freeloaders enjoy the
same benefit without paying the cost, so all else being equal,
freeloading should be an individual’s best choice — and,
therefore, we should all be freeloaders eventually.

Many millennia of evolution acting on both our genes and our cultural
practices have equipped people with ways of getting past that
obstacle, says Muthukrishna, who coauthored a look at the evolution
of cooperation 
[[link removed]]in
the 2021  _Annual Review of Psychology._ This cultural-genetic
coevolution stacked the deck in human society so that cooperation
became the smart move rather than a sucker’s choice. Over thousands
of years, that has allowed us to live in villages, towns and cities;
work together to build farms, railroads and other communal projects;
and develop educational systems and governments.

Evolution has enabled all this by shaping us to value the unwritten
rules of society, to feel outrage when someone else breaks those rules
and, crucially, to care what others think about us.

“Over the long haul, human psychology has been modified so that
we’re able to feel emotions that make us identify with the goals of
social groups,” says Rob Boyd [[link removed]], an
evolutionary anthropologist at the Institute for Human Origins at
Arizona State University.

For a demonstration of this, one need look no further than a simple
lab experiment that psychologists call the dictator game. In this
game, researchers give a sum of money to one person (the dictator) and
tell them they can split the money however they’d like with an
unknown other person whom they will never meet. Even though no overt
rule prohibits them from keeping all the money themselves, many
people’s innate sense of fairness leads them to split the money
50-50 [[link removed]]. Cultures
differ in how often this happens, but even societies where the sense
of fairness is weakest still choose a fair split fairly often.

Lab experiments such as this, together with field studies, are giving
psychologists a better understanding of the psychological factors that
underpin when, and why, people cooperate. Here are some of the
essential takeaways:

We cooperate for different reasons at different social scales

For very small groups, family bonds and direct reciprocity — I’ll
help you today, on the expectation that you will help me tomorrow —
may provide enough impetus for cooperation. But that works only if
everyone knows one another and interacts frequently, says
Muthukrishna. When a group gets big enough that people often interact
with someone they’ve never dealt with before, reputation can
substitute for direct experience. In these conditions, individuals are
more likely to risk cooperating with others who have a reputation for
doing their share.

Once a group gets so large that people can no longer count on knowing
someone’s reputation
[[link removed]],
though, cooperation depends on a less personal force: the informal
rules of behavior known as norms. Norms represent a culture’s
expectations about how one should behave, how one should and
shouldn’t act. Breaking a norm — whether by littering, jumping a
subway turnstile or expressing overt racism — exposes violators to
social disapproval that may range from a gentle “tut-tut” to
social ostracism. People also tend to internalize their culture’s
norms and generally adhere to them even when there is no prospect of
punishment — as seen, for example, in the dictator game.

But there may be a limit to the power of norms, says Erez Yoeli
[[link removed]], a behavioral scientist at the MIT Sloan
School of Management. The enforcement of norms depends on social
disapproval of violators, so they work only within social groups.
Since nations are the largest groups that most people identify
strongly with, that may make norms relatively toothless in developing
international cooperation for issues such as climate change.

“The problem isn’t owned by a single group, so it’s kind of a
race to the bottom,” says Yoeli. Social skills that go beyond
cooperation, and psychological tools other than norms, may be more
important in working through global problems, he speculates. “These
are the ones we struggle a bit to solve.”

Reputation is more powerful than financial incentives in encouraging
cooperation

Almost a decade ago, Yoeli and his colleagues trawled through the
published literature to see what worked and what didn’t at
encouraging prosocial behavior. Financial incentives such as
contribution-matching or cash, or rewards for participating, such as
offering T-shirts for blood donors, sometimes worked and sometimes
didn’t, they found. In contrast, reputational rewards — making
individuals’ cooperative behavior public — consistently boosted
participation
[[link removed]].
The result has held up in the years since. “If anything, the results
are stronger,” says Yoeli.

Financial rewards will work if you pay people enough, Yoeli notes —
but the cost of such incentives could be prohibitive. One study of 782
German residents, for example, surveyed whether paying people to
receive a Covid vaccine would increase vaccine uptake. It did, but
researchers found that boosting vaccination rates significantly would
have required a payment of at least 3,250 euros
[[link removed]]
— a dauntingly steep price.

And payoffs can actually diminish the reputational rewards people
could otherwise gain for cooperative behavior, because others may be
unsure whether the person was acting out of altruism or just doing it
for the money. “Financial rewards kind of muddy the water about
people’s motivations,” says Yoeli. “That undermines any
reputational benefit from doing the deed.”

Gossip plays a lead role in enforcing norms

When people see someone breaking a norm — for example, by
freeloading when cooperation was expected — they have three ways to
punish the violation, says Catherine Molho
[[link removed]], a psychologist
at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam: They can confront the offender
directly about their transgression; they can shun that person in the
future; or they can tell others about the offender’s bad behavior.
The latter response — gossip, or the sharing of information about a
third party when they are not present — may have unique strengths,
says Molho.

The clearest example of this comes from an online experiment led by
Molho’s colleague Paul Van Lange [[link removed]], a
behavioral scientist also at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The study
used a standard lab procedure called a public goods game, in which
each participant receives a sum of money and can choose to contribute
none, some or all of it to a shared pool. The experimenters then
double the money in the shared pool and divide it equally among all
participants, whether they contributed or not. The group as a whole
maximizes their earnings if everyone puts all their money in the pool
— but a freeloader could do even better, by keeping their own cash
and reaping a share of what others put in the pool.

Crucially, people played the game not just once but four times, with
different partners each time. Between rounds, some participants had an
opportunity to punish freeloaders from their most recent group by
paying some of their own money to the experimenters, who would fine
the freeloader three times the amount of that payment. Others were
given the chance to gossip — that is, to tell members of the
freeloaders’ new group that they had failed to cooperate. Sure
enough, the gossip led to higher levels of cooperation
[[link removed]] — but, surprisingly,
direct punishment did not, the researchers found.

People use the power of gossip in the real world, too. In one recent
study, Molho and her colleagues texted 309 volunteers at four random
times each day for 10 days to ask if they had shared information with
others in their social network, or received information from them,
about someone else. If so, a follow-up questionnaire gathered more
information.

The 309 participants reported more than 5,000 total instances of
gossip over that time, and about 15 percent were about norm violations
such as tossing trash in the street or making racist or sexist
comments. People tended to gossip more with closer friends, and about
more distant acquaintances. Gossip recipients reported that this
negative information made them less likely to help the untrustworthy
and more likely to avoid them
[[link removed]].

“One reason gossip is such a powerful tool is you can accomplish
many social functions,” says Molho. “You feel closer to the person
who shared information with you. But we also find it provides useful
information for social interaction — I learn who to cooperate with
and who to avoid.”

And gossip serves another function, too, says Van Lange: Gossipers can
sort through their feelings about whether a norm violation is
important, whether there were mitigating circumstances and what
response is appropriate. This helps reinforce the social norms and can
help people coordinate their response to offenders, he says.

We like being on trend — and on the cutting edge

Some well-meaning ways of encouraging cooperation don’t work — and
may even backfire. In particular, telling people what others actually
do (“Most people are trying to reduce how often they fly”) is more
effective than telling them what they should do (“You should fly
less — it’s bad for the climate”). In fact, the “should”
message sometimes backfires. “People may read something behind the
message,” says Cristina Bicchieri
[[link removed]], a
behavioral scientist at the University of Pennsylvania: Telling
someone they should do something may signal that people don’t, in
fact, do it.

Bicchieri and her colleague Erte Xiao tested this in a dictator game
where some participants were told that other people shared equally,
while others were told that people thought everyone should share
equally. Only the first message increased the likelihood of an equal
share [[link removed]], they
found.

That result makes sense, says Yoeli. “It sends a very clear message
about social expectations: If everybody else is doing this, it sends a
very credible signal about what they expect me to do.”

This poses a problem, of course, if most people don’t actually
choose a socially desirable behavior, such as installing solar panels.
“If you just say that 15 percent do that, you normalize the fact
that 85 percent don’t,” says Bicchieri. But there’s a
work-around: It turns out that even a minority can nudge people toward
a desired behavior if the number is increasing, thus providing a
trendy bandwagon to hop on. In one experiment, for example,
researchers measured the amount of water volunteers used while
brushing their teeth. People who had been told that a small but
increasing proportion of people
[[link removed]] were
conserving water used less water than those who heard only that a
small proportion conserved.

Much remains unknown

Behavioral scientists are just beginning to crack the problem of
cooperation, and many questions remain. In particular, very little is
known yet about why cultures hold the norms that they do, or how norms
change over time. “There’s a lot of ideas about the within-group
processes that cause norms to be replaced, but there’s not much
consensus,” says Boyd, who is working on the problem now.

Everyone does agree that, eventually, natural selection will determine
the outcome, as cultures whose norms do not enhance survival die out
and are replaced by those with norms that do. But that’s not a test
most of us would be willing to take.

10.1146/knowable-032923-1

_BOB HOLMES is a science writer based in Edmonton, Canada._

_This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine
[[link removed]], an independent journalistic
endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter
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[Knowable Magazine | Annual Reviews]

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