Human cooperation in groups: variation begets variation

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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Human cooperation in groups: variation begets variation

Lucas Molleman Pieter Van Den Berg Mikael Puurtinen Jaakko Junikka Franz J. Weissing

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Adult Male ta520 genetic structures PREFERENCES Bioinformatics INDIVIDUAL-DIFFERENCES Article Young Adult Game Theory public goods game Public goods game Humans Medicine Cooperative Behavior Neighbourhood (mathematics)cooperation tendency Multidisciplinary business.industry Cooperativeness human cooperation Prisoner's dilemma Public good PERSONALITY-DIFFERENCES EVOLUTION SOCIAL VALUE ORIENTATION Variation (linguistics)Group selection GROUP SELECTION Cooperation Heterogeneity Public goods Behavioural experiment ANIMAL PERSONALITIES heterogeneous behaviour PRISONERS-DILEMMA ta1181 Female HUMAN ALTRUISM business Social psychology Game theory BEHAVIOR

description

Open Access Published: 04 November 2015 Human cooperation in groups: variation begets variation Pieter van den Berg, Lucas Molleman, Jaakko Junikka, Mikael Puurtinen & Franz J. Weissing Scientific Reports volume 5, Article number: 16144 (2015) Cite this article 383 Accesses 4 Citations 6 Altmetric Metricsdetails Abstract Many experiments on human cooperation have revealed that individuals differ systematically in their tendency to cooperate with others. It has also been shown that individuals condition their behaviour on the overall cooperation level of their peers. Yet, little is known about how individuals respond to heterogeneity in cooperativeness in their neighbourhood. Here, we present an experimental study investigating whether and how people respond to heterogeneous behaviour in a public goods game. We find that a large majority of subjects does respond to heterogeneity in their group, but they respond in quite different ways. Most subjects contribute less to the public good when the contributions of their peers are more heterogeneous, but a substantial fraction of individuals consistently contributes more in this case. In addition, we find that individuals that respond positively to heterogeneity have a higher general cooperation tendency. The finding that social responsiveness occurs in different forms and is correlated with cooperativeness may have important implications for the outcome of cooperative interactions. peerReviewed

year	journal	country	edition	language
2015-11-04