David Rand publishes paper in Nature showing that cooperation is intuitive

Incoming Professor David Rand has published a paper this week in the journal Nature, exploring the cognitive basis of prosocial behavior by studying the decisions of over 3000 subjects from around the world. The paper demonstrates that when faced with the chance to help the group at a cost to oneself, people’s first response tends to be cooperative, while stopping to think encourages selfishness. Rand and his coauthors provide evidence that these cooperative intuitions develop in daily life, where cooperative is advantageous because of factors such as reputation and sanctions, and then spill over into one-shot anonymous settings like those studied in the experiments.