The Science of Human Cooperation
Introduction: Would you cooperate if there were no incentive such as money, an award or praise? According to Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651), humans are inherently selfish, thinking of their own survival and self-interest. From a Hobbesian lens, cooperation can seem like a deal or contract:
one cooperates because it benefits or protects them in return. But this does not explain everything that humans do. People sometimes help others even when there is no clear reward.
Table of Contents
As an Act of Goodness
Cooperation may not always be a calculation of personal or material gain. Consider holding a door for a stranger, helping someone pick up something they have dropped, giving directions to a stranger, or sharing your food with someone. Sometimes we do these things because they feel normal, morally right, or simply like acts of goodness.
As a Psychological Ability
According to Warneken, Chen and Tomasello, in their study of children’s cooperative behaviour, children can take part in joint activities at a very young age. Cooperation is also influenced by trust, relationships and how people see “us” and “them”. Cooperation, therefore, is not something that adults simply learn because society tells them to. Humans probably have psychological abilities that make cooperation possible from an early age.
Sense of Belonging
Belonging is also an important factor. Humans naturally seek relationships, connection and a sense of belonging, according to scholarly research. Social norms also shape how we behave towards others. Over time, these expectations can become everyday habits, making us cooperate without thinking. A person may simply learn that when someone needs help, helping them is the right thing to do.
Altruism
This further brings us to ‘altruism’. Helping may make us feel good or give us a sense of doing the right thing. Altruism, therefore, does not necessarily mean receiving no reward; it can mean that the main purpose is to help another person rather than to gain money or direct material benefit.
Expectations from Others
Cooperation could be associated with beliefs about what we expect from others, social norms, altruism, patience and responses to risky situations. In Homo cooperans, a 2026 study by Andre, Boneva, Chopra and Falk involving 101,123 people across 125 countries, 69% chose to cooperate, while expecting only about 47% of others to cooperate in return.
Interestingly, people sometimes fail to cooperate because they assume that everyone else is selfish. But others may be more willing to cooperate than we think, while they, too, are living in the same dilemma.
Past Behaviour
There is a popular saying, “A friend in need is a friend indeed.” But how do we know who is a friend or foe among billions of people around us? So, we depend on repeated interactions.
In Nichola Raihani’s book, The Social Instinct, she discusses how people often prefer cooperative people as partners, and how a person’s reputation can influence whether others trust and cooperate with them. In this way, past behaviour can tell others whether a person is likely to be a trustworthy friend or a difficult partner.
Conclusion
So, if the world is “every person for themselves”, do we truly need cooperation? Perhaps we do. Families, hospitals, economies and societies depend on people working together. The modern world cannot function without cooperation. Human beings are, therefore, neither completely selfish nor completely selfless.
We cooperate because it can benefit us, because we expect others to cooperate, because we want connections and belonging as social beings, and because our values and norms show that helping others is right. Sometimes cooperation has a clear reward, sometimes a psychological reward, and sometimes no clear reward. We simply help because it has become a norm for what we understand a good person should do.
