title: Humans display a 'cooperative phenotype' that is domain general and temporally stable.
abstract: 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'.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06511, USA.
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Peysakhovich
authors.affiliation: 1] Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA [2] Department of Mathematics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA [3] Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
authors.forename: Martin A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Nowak
authors.affiliation: 1] Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06511, USA [2] Department of Economics, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06511, USA [3] School of Management, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06511, USA.
authors.forename: David G
authors.initials: DG
authors.lastname: Rand
mesh_terms: D005075:Biological Evolution; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D003657:Decision Making; D005716:Game Theory; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D015233:Models, Statistical; D010641:Phenotype; D011678:Punishment; D013997:Time Factors