Humans display a ‘cooperative phenotype’ that is domain general and temporally stable
Open accessAbstract
Understanding human cooperation is of major interest across the natural and social sciences. But it is unclear to what extent cooperation is actually a general concept. Most research on cooperation has implicitly assumed that a person's behaviour in one cooperative context is related to their behaviour in other settings, and at later times. However, there is little empirical evidence in support of this assumption. Here, we provide such evidence by collecting thousands of game decisions from over 1,400 individuals. A person's decisions in different cooperation games are correlated, as are those decisions and both self-report and real-effort measures of cooperation in non-game contexts. Equally strong correlations exist between cooperative decisions made an average of 124 days apart. Importantly, we find that cooperation is not correlated with norm-enforcing punishment or non-competitiveness. We conclude that there is a domain-general and temporally stable inclination towards paying costs to benefit others, which we dub the 'cooperative phenotype'.
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Moral values appear to be deeply-held, stable across time, and resistant to change.
“However, since moral values appear to be deeply-held, stable across time, and resistant to change 11 – 13 , a parallel literature on moral cognition makes a different prediction: insofar as punishment is a method of restoring justice following a moral violation, punitive preferences should be less susceptible to group influence.”
From Crowdsourcing punishment: Individuals reference group preferences to inform their own punitive decisions (2019) · cites this paper as [12]
The ‘Stability of game play over time’ section reports that cooperative game behavior remained correlated across measurements months apart. The paper does not establish that moral values generally are deeply held or resistant to change; its temporal finding concerns cooperation behavior, not moral values broadly. (LLM, conf=0.86)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredStochastic transitions in social structures can arise from the effects of weather, animal migration and movement, and role reversal.
“Stochastic transitions in social structures can arise from the effects of weather, animal migration and movement, and role reversal [47].”
From Strategy evolution on dynamic networks (2023) · cites this paper as [47]
The “Stability of game play over time” section examines whether individuals’ cooperation in online games remains stable; it does not discuss transitions in social structures. Searches for weather, migration, movement, role reversal, and stochastic changes found no passage addressing the claimed causes. (LLM, conf=0.76)
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- Authors
- Peysakhovich, A., Nowak, M. A., & Rand, D. G.
- Affiliations
- Yale University (US)
- Harvard University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Rand, David G.
- Venue
- Nature Communications
- Published
- 2014-09-16
- Volume
- 5
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 4939-4939
- ISSN
- 2041-1723 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3124682720
- Cited by
- 426
- References
- 73
- Citations by year
- 2026: 20 · 2025: 18 · 2024: 23 · 2023: 20 · 2022: 38 · 2021: 48 · 2020: 73 · 2019: 34 · 2018: 37 · 2017: 34 · 2016: 35 · 2015: 34 · 2014: 9 · 2013: 3
- FWCI
- 104.24
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Nature Communications (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- John Templeton Foundation
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
- Keywords
- human cooperation, domain generality, temporal stability, inter-individual consistency, cooperation games, self-report measures, prosocial behavior
- MeSH terms
- Cooperative Behavior, Decision Making, Biological Evolution, Game Theory, Humans, Interpersonal Relations, Phenotype, Punishment, Time Factors, Models, Statistical
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