Cooperation

Correcting a Lack of Cooperation

Study shows that building bridges can foster working together better.

The Harvard Gazette

This Halloween, a Social Experiment Will Allow Internet Users to Control the Actions of a Real Person

MIT Media Laboratory’s BeeMe is the love child of Black Mirror and psychologist Stanley Milgram’s notorious experiments on free will and obedience.

Smithsonian

Why Are Some Religions More Popular Than Others?

Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism are followed by roughly 75 percent of the global population. What made these religions, with billions of believers, so successful while others fizzled?

The Crux, Discover

Would You Behave Cooperatively If Nobody Was Watching?

New research suggests that cooperation may be a reversible habit.

Behavioural and Social Sciences at Nature Research

Shame May Feel Awful But New Cross-Cultural Evidence Shows It Is Fundamental to Our Survival

The essential job of shame, it seems, is to stop us from being too selfish for our own good.

British Psychological Society Research Digest

Neanderthals Provided Healthcare to Sick and Injured

Providing healthcare was a fundamental collaborative survival strategy for Neanderthals, according to researchers.

Newsweek

Cooperation Thrives When We (Mostly) Prefer People We Already Know

Structured populations — societies where people belong to tightly bunched in-groups woven within larger, looser networks — are mathematically the most promising for sustaining long-term, reliable cooperation.

Science on Religion

Scientists, Philosophers Explain What Makes a Person ‘Good’

And how do you become a good person? Can a bad person truly become a good person?

Exploring the Human Propensity to Cooperate

Working with a nomadic group in Tanzania, one of the last remaining nomadic hunter-gatherer populations, Penn psychologists show that cooperation is flexible, not fixed.

Penn Today

Seeking Human Generosity’s Origins in an Ape’s Gift to Another Ape

Studying the behavior of our closest living relatives may help scientists better understand the human impulse for generosity.

The New York Times

Loyal Sports Fans Illustrate an Ancient Human Instinct, Says Psychologist

Yarrow Dunham analyzed studies that examined a variety of human situations involving social groups and the people excluded from them, finding that people consistently show an in-group bias.

Inverse

How Can We Promote Cooperation in an Uncooperative Society?

A branch of mathematics known as evolutionary graph theory has some promising answers.

Scientific American

Is the Key to Successful Prosocial Nudges Reputation?

Reputational motives drive prosocial behavior. How can we harness them for good?

Behavioral Scientist

Nobody Likes a Freeloader — Including Four-Year-Old Kids

“Kids have a pretty strong set of pro-social intuitions around fairness and cooperation, and the need to contribute to larger public goods,” said Yarrow Dunham, assistant professor of psychology.

Quartz

Creating God

An in-depth look at a provocative idea about the origin and purpose of the world’s religions.

Hidden Brain, NPR

Game-Changing Game Changes

Contests that can change based on players’ actions help researchers understand the evolution of cooperation.

The Harvard Gazette

Feasting Rituals — and the Cooperation They Require — Are a Crucial Step Toward Human Civilization

How did civilization emerge from small groups of hunter-gatherers? Some archaeologists focus on cooperation as the vital ingredient — and find evidence for it in the form of feast-related artifacts.

The Conversation

Does Marching to the Same Rhythm Always Unite Us? Our New Study Says No

Rhythm and synchrony might be exactly what you don’t want if you’re trying to accomplish a practical goal.

Science on Religion

Gossiping Is Good

The surprising virtues of talking behind people’s backs.

The Atlantic

Larry David and the Game Theory of Anonymous Donations

What’s intriguing about anonymous giving, and other behaviors apparently designed to obscure good traits and acts, like modesty, is that it’s “hard to reconcile with standard evolutionary accounts of pro-social behavior,” the researchers write.

Nautilus

Why Grandmothers May Hold The Key To Human Evolution

What made us human might have had less to do with men out hunting, and a lot more to do with what was going on at home — with grandmas and babies.

Goats & Soda, NPR