Abstract
At sometimes substantial cost to themselves, humans benefit others and the overarching collective to which they and others belong. They jump into ice-cold rivers to save drowning strangers and donate their organs to improve the lives of unknown others (Batson, 1998). They volunteer for military service to defend their country against enemy forces or even sacrifice their own life as suicide bomber to enhance the fate of their close kin (Kruglanski, Chen, Deschesne, Fishman, & Orehek, 2009; Tobena, 2009). However, behind these rather stunning forms of self-sacrifice are the many more mundane and less noticeable, but no less important, forms of cooperation. These mundane contributions provide for a well-maintained local playground to relax and socialize, create a local irrigation system benefitting a community of farmers downstream, or establish public health care and accessible education. In fact, it is these mundane forms of cooperation that enable societies and their citizens to survive and prosper. It stands to reason that societies cannot exist without such mundane forms of cooperation.
But cooperation is not a given. Too often, the human capacity for cooperation remains unexploited, leading to ineffective management of common resources such as fossil fuel, failures to negotiate necessary budget reforms, and inadequate leadership behavior that crowds out rather than promotes cooperation among followers. These and other failures to cooperate “leave money on the table” and may create serious problems to individuals, communities, or the broader society. Such failures bring us close to destroying the very biosphere upon which we depend (Wilson, 2012). In the meantime, they promote distrust and suspicion; create feelings of deprivation, envy, and contempt; and trigger social conflict and the breakdown of societal functioning (De Dreu, 2010).
For quite some time, scientists have conceptualized human cooperation as an anomaly—a deviation from the prototypical homo economicus (Colman, 2003; Ostrom, 1998). More recently, cooperation is considered the default mode from which humans deviate only under specific conditions (Rand, Greene, & Nowak, 2012; Wilson & Holldobler, 2005). Neither of these radical positions is scientifically tenable and both are practically useless. In fact, four decades of research and scholarly inquiry across the social and behavioral sciences has created a nuanced picture of human cooperation, revealing when and why it emerges and breaks down. These works teach us that cooperation is malleable and contingent upon a broad range of traits and states that interact, sometimes in complex fashion. Accordingly, we know much about the ways communication affects the provision of public goods and aids in the regulation of common resources (e.g., Kerr & Kaufman-Gilliland, 1994), about the impact of incentive structures and sanctioning systems (e.g., Fehr & Gachter, 2002), or about the role of self-governance in public goods provision (Cardenas & Carpenter, 2008). We have even begun to unravel the evolved brain circuitries and neurohormonal modulators of human cooperation (De Dreu, 2012; Rilling & Sanfey, 2011).
It is these varied bodies of knowledge that Parks, Joireman, and Van Lange (2013, this issue) integrate into a comprehensive and much needed review. Larded with vivid examples, they provide an empirically sound model of the traits and states that, alone or in combination, promote cooperative decision making in public goods and common resource problems. Their model nicely integrates earlier work on interdependence theory and the transformation of motivation (Kelley & Thibaut, 1978), the appropriateness framework (Weber, Kopelman, & Messick, 2004), and evolutionary theory on cooperation in the context of intergroup competition (Bowles & Gintis, 2004). Ultimately, the model provides for a deep understanding of how traits like social value orientation and states like incentive structures and decision framing interact in moving individuals toward or away from cooperative choice.
The problems Parks and colleagues tackle are of vital importance to contemporary society, and the policy solutions and interventions they suggest may provide substantial benefit to future generations. Their analysis of public goods provision versus common resource management touches a core distinction often overlooked in policy making. Their modeling of how incentive structures and sanctioning systems “reframe the game”—from one in which cooperation is intrinsically motivating to one in which it is extrinsically driven—is critical. And particularly insightful is their analysis of antagonistic behaviors in which individuals, or subgroups within a larger collective, deliberately block the provision of a public good or the sustainable management of common resources. Although the practical implications are clearly defined, it is the antagonistic tendencies that are in need of new research. After all, it is these tendencies that lead humans to suspect each other of ulterior motives, to fear being exploited by others, and to decide upfront to withhold their cooperation. Identifying opportunities for antagonism, and the factors that reduce its occurrence, will ultimately bring us closer to sustainable cooperation that enables people and their governments to fight climate change and to prevent social conflict and societal breakdown. Parks, Joireman, and Van Lange have done us a great service by providing a sound and insightful basis for scientists and practitioners to effectively challenge the problem of human cooperation.