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22 - The Ontogeny and Evolution of Cooperation

from Part VI - Evolution and Development

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2020

By
Sebastian Grüneisen  and
Emily Wyman
Edited by
Lance Workman ,
Will Reader  and
Jerome H. Barkow
Lance Workman
Affiliation:
University of South Wales
Will Reader
Affiliation:
Sheffield Hallam University
Jerome H. Barkow
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia
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Summary

Striking examples of human cooperation include people donating blood, paying their taxes, and helping total strangers on the street. These are acts of altruistic cooperation – behaviors that benefit the collective at a cost to the individual. To many researchers, explaining altruistic behaviors is central to understanding human cooperative uniqueness (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2003; Gintis et al., 2005), with the central question being how the fruits of cooperation can be enjoyed without being exploited by individuals who free-ride on the benevolent actions of others while not contributing themselves. Over recent decades, substantial advances have been made in identifying the factors that sustain cooperation in this context (Camerer, 2011; Hammerstein, 2003; Milinski, Semmann, & Krambeck, 2002). Here, we take a different approach and argue that an equally fundamental challenge of cooperation is for individuals to coordinate their behavior in order to generate mutual benefits (the “forgotten problem of cooperation”.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior , pp. 265 - 275
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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