Why people work together
Published: Friday, Feb 23rd 2024, 09:50
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Swiss researchers have challenged current theories on the emergence of cooperative behavior in human evolution. In a new study, they show that it is a mixture of cohesion within a group and competition between different groups that strengthens cooperation.
The two predominant explanatory approaches - repetitive interactions on the one hand and group competition on the other - would therefore work together rather than individually, the University of Zurich (UZH) announced on Friday.
According to the UZH, one of the great unsolved mysteries of human evolution is how cooperative behaviors were able to prevail in human evolution. In a world where the materially successful individuals multiply and the others slowly die out, what has led to a behavioral pattern prevailing that gives greater weight to the benefit of the community than the benefit of the individual?
To find this out, behavioral economists from the Universities of Zurich, Lausanne and Constance (Germany) had two indigenous people in Papua New Guinea exchange money with each other in a kind of trust game. The result of this experiment: when paired with an anonymous member of their own tribe, the participants exchanged very large amounts of money. In contrast, very little was transferred when paired with members of other tribes.
Competition strengthens cooperation
"Repetitive interactions create an incentive for cooperation within the group. However, this is a fragile state. Competition between groups, on the other hand, has a stabilizing effect on this fragile state," explained Charles Efferson from the University of Lausanne.
The explanation for the emergence of cooperative behavior through repetitive interactions is based on the idea that people cooperate because they expect to meet the same people again later. If they were to behave antisocially, they would be punished for it in the future.
The main idea of the second explanation is that groups with many selfish members are more likely to die out because they are worse off overall. According to this theory, if the effect of group selection was strong enough, populations developed in such a way that people were cooperative with members of the in-group and selfish with members of the out-group.
The theory presented in the journal "Nature" now states that these two explanatory approaches work together.
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