We Are Not Born to Cooperate

Are you a cooperative person? Humans have achieved impressive levels of cooperation. From getting together to hunt down animals much larger than ourselves to building massive infrastructures, examples of successful cooperation are everywhere. The history of human progress is the history of cooperation!

Cooperation and Public Goods

Or is it? Let’s put it to the test. Imagine that you and four other people, none of whom you have ever met or will meet again, are given $10 each. Each of you must decide how much to put into a common fund. You can put the whole $10 there, you can put nothing at all (and keep all of your $10), or you can split the money however you want. So can everybody else. You will make your decisions privately and without talking to the others.

After everybody decides, the money in the common fund will be doubled. Each dollar will become two. Then, and here comes the catch, whatever is in there will be divided equally (no matter whether you put in more or less than others) among you and the other four people.

If everybody puts the whole $10 in the fund, the $50 there will be doubled to $100. So you (and everybody else) will get $20 back. You double your investment! That is what cooperation means.

But wait. If everybody else puts $10 in, why should you invest? If you keep your $10 instead while the others invest $10 each, there will be $40 in the fund. Doubled to $80 and divided by five, that means that you will get $16. Added to the $10 you kept, you will total $26. That is better than $20! This is called free riding because you profit from others but do not contribute.

So, what would you do?

The analysis of rational (but egoistic) behavior is called game theory, but it is usually quite serious. In this case, it predicts that nobody will contribute anything. For every dollar you put in, you only get 40 cents back, so you lose 60 cents. But for every dollar other people put in, you earn 40 cents at no cost. So everybody wants everybody else to contribute everything without contributing anything themselves. The prediction, which is called a Nash equilibrium in honor of the Nobel Prize winner John Nash, is that nobody will contribute, and the opportunity to double everybody’s money will be wasted.

This example is called a public goods game, and it has been studied in hundreds of behavioral laboratories around the world. It captures the essence of the problem of contributing to a good that will be enjoyed by a group, be it financing a new elevator in your old apartment building or paying taxes to fund roads, hospitals, and safe streets.

In those experiments, many people voluntarily contribute, at least in part, which contradicts rational (egoistic) behavior. However, few people contribute everything, and if the game is repeated several times with the same people, cooperation tends to break down at the end, when there can be no consequences for being a free rider.

Cooperation and Intuition

Why do some people still contribute when it is not rational to do so? Some research in psychology suggests cooperation might be intuitive for humans. That is, our first, ingrained reaction is to cooperate, and only on second thought are we tempted by the benefits of free riding.

This is a positive, heartwarming view of human behavior, which reminds us of Rousseau’s bon sauvage. The evidence for this was that, in a series of experiments with public good games (Rand, Greene, and Nowak 2012), cooperative decisions were faster than decisions to keep the money. Since intuitive decisions tend to be fast, researchers concluded that decisions to cooperate should be mostly intuitive. Further, putting participants under time pressure by giving them a time limit, which should increase intuitive behavior, led to larger contributions (see this post on why and how you should avoid time pressure in your life).

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The problem with this view is that it is too optimistic to be true. First, other researchers pointed out that even if intuitive decisions tend to be fast, that does not mean that every fast decision is intuitive (Myrseth and Wollbrant, 2017). There are, indeed, other reasons why a decision might be fast, for instance, that your preference for one or the other option is clear to you (those are called psychometric effects in psychology). Also, comparing the speeds of decisions across people says little about intuition, as some people are faster than others. And, for both reasons, some people might not really be under time pressure even when given a time limit.

Second, psychology is not an exact science. Human behavior is noisy. Sometimes, you get lucky (or unlucky) in your experiments and get results that cannot be reproduced later. This is what happened here: a large-scale, multi-laboratory reproduction effort (Bouwmeester et al., 2017) failed to confirm the original effects.

Is cooperation intuitive? It depends.

So what is going on? As is so often the case, simple answers like “cooperation is intuitive” are catchy, but the truth is more complicated. In a study published a few years ago (Alós-Ferrer and Garagnani 2020), we measured the prosociality of people. Broadly speaking, that means how much you care about the welfare of others compared to your own. We also let the same people play a public good game under time pressure, but using a method that ensured even fast people would be under pressure. The result was that cooperation was more intuitive for more prosocial people, but free-riding was more intuitive for less prosocial people.

This means that some people are intuitively cooperative, and some people are not. Especially for cooperation in groups, there might be many of the latter. For example, other studies have shown that many people might be generous toward others but selfish toward groups.

It also means that cooperation is not ingrained. We are probably not born with a cooperative or noncooperative attitude. For humans, intuition is not only about the deep-rooted behaviors we are born with. We train our intuition over our lives (so driving a car can become quite intuitive), and what becomes intuitive depends on your social environment, your culture, and your personal experiences (more on intuition here).

The benefits of not being (so) cooperative

We would all be better off if we were all extremely cooperative (as in the public good game). But that is not going to happen. There will always be some free riders: the temptation is too strong. And, if you are a natural cooperator, they will take advantage of you.

We should not expect cooperation in groups to happen spontaneously, or be outraged when it does not. That is, after all, why we have tax laws instead of voluntary contributions, and why our politicians fight about how high those taxes should be. And maybe it is not so bad that cooperation does not happen naturally all the time. An example of cooperation in markets is when firms agree to raise their prices to jointly increase their profits instead of competing with each other. This is called collusion, and it is illegal in most countries because it harms consumers. Likewise, cooperation among criminals (“don’t talk to the police!”) hurts law-abiding citizens.

So, are you a cooperator? If your answer is “yes,” you will be taken advantage of, and you might harm others if you cooperate with the wrong people. If your answer is “no,” you might be taking advantage of others and preventing groups from profiting from joint opportunities. Your answer should probably be, “It depends.” Fortunately, real life is less extreme than a public good game, and offers you plenty of opportunities to build trust with others and decide when to cooperate and when to be wary and protect yourself.