Is Human Cooperation Innate Or Learned? En Essay, Part 2

If you have not read Part 1, make sure to check it out before reading this post!

As mentioned before, nowadays it is very common to see strangers engaging in an act of cooperation. Nevertheless, studies on primates and small-scale societies suggest that any transaction with anyone beyond the local group is plagued with danger, mistrust, and exploitation (Hammerstein, 2003). Therefore, in order to reach the current large societies that we live in, pro-social behaviors may have evolved from the need to sustain beneficial exchanges in contexts where established social relationships, such as kin, were insufficient. Theory suggests that the evolution of such societies may have required norms and institutions to ensure the fairness of transactions (Henrich et al., 2010). These norms and institutions dictated the rules for cooperation while also establishing punishment for those who did not adhere to them. Therefore, the long exposure to norms and the gradual internalization of them is theorized to have domesticated our inner psychology enabling us to have large-scale cooperation. If this is true, then the level of cooperation found in society would somehow be dictated by its norms or correlated to the sturdiness of its institutions. The following example suggests that institutions and norms indeed are correlated to the levels of cooperation found in the society it operates.

Another experiment that suggests human beings are cooperative in nature, but that the degree of cooperation human beings achieve is altered by content was conducted by Valerio Capraro and Giorgia Cococcioni. Furthermore, this research also provides a deeper insight into how a low SES and institutions or more generally society and experience can shape the cooperation of an individual. To conduct the experiment, they used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (AMT) and recruited participants exclusively from India. AMT is a marketplace of human intelligence that enables companies or researchers to access it programmatically (“Amazon Mechanical Turk,” n.d.). At that point in time India was the second most active country on AMT (Ross, Irani, Silberman, Zaldivar, & Tomlinson, 2010) which facilitated their collection of data. Good institutions are essential for the evolution of cooperation (Capraro & Cococcioni, 2015). Nevertheless, Corruption and cronyism are plagues in Indian society (Miklian & Carney, 2013; Quah, 2008). Therefore, Capraro and Cococcioni expected the participants to exhibit very little trust in strangers and were likely to have internalized non-cooperative behavior in their everyday life.

The game Capraro and Cococcioni used in their experiment was a version of the two-person prisoner’s dilemma (PD). In this version, the rules were explained to each participant, and each participant was given an endowment of 0.20 dollars. From the 0.20 dollars, the participant could send x amount to the other participant while keeping the rest. When the other participant received the money it would be multiplied times two (note that any money kept was not multiplied by two). Furthermore, each participant was told that the other participant would be facing the same exact dilemma. In addition, the experiment was divided into two conditions differentiated by a time constraint. The time pressure group only had ten seconds to make a decision, while the time delay group had 30 seconds. A total of 949 subjects participated, but the results contained a lot of noise (Ross et al., 2010). Only 449 participants passed the comprehension test and any further analysis mentioned will be focused on these participants. It is important to mention, as it will become relevant in the results, that among the demographic questions asked, participants were questioned if they had previously participated is games like that one (exchanging money with strangers).

Pixabay image source.

The results show that there is no significant difference between the two groups, time pressure and time delay. On average, time pressure participants transferred 27.93% of their endowment while time delay participants transferred 28.57%. A similar previous Capraro experiment done in the United States of America showed that participants transferred on average 52% of their endowment (Capraro, Jordan, & Rand, 2015). Therefore, comparing these two studies, we can support the initial expectation that an average Indian sample is particularly non-cooperative (at least when compared to the USA). When doing further analysis on the results, the researchers were able to identify a significant result. There was a significant difference between experienced participants and inexperienced ones but only when they were under the time constraint. In other words, experienced subject cooperated more than inexperienced ones, but only when there was a time constraint. Explaining a negative effect of experience on cooperation is easy. It can be attributed to the understanding of the pay-off matrices. On the other hand, explaining a positive effect is harder. Such positive effect seen on participants with previous experience can be attributed to be one of two things. One possibility is that since these participants had previous experience on similar games, they might have learned that cooperation can be strategically advantageous. On the other hand, another possibility is that the Turkers are themselves developing a community that favors the emergence of pro-social attitudes. These are just speculations. To truly understand which mechanisms promote the emergence of pro-social attitudes, more research is need. Capraro and Cococcioni wanted to promote either intuition or reflection with the time constraints and with these results concluded that there is no significant difference. Nevertheless, I want to look at their results from a different angle and to do so, I would like to address the social heuristics hypothesis (SHH) (Rand et al., 2014).

The SHH states that during your everyday social interactions you record successful strategies and once internalized, they become heuristics. Then, when faced with a new or atypical situation, you rely on those heuristics as an intuitive response. Nevertheless, deliberating on a situation can cause you to ignore these heuristics and have a reaction that is more tailored to the current situation. Therefore, SHH would predict that inexperienced participants coming from a non-cooperative environment would bring their non-cooperative behavior to the experiment, regardless of the time constraint. The time pressure group would be non-cooperative because non-cooperation is the intuitive or default strategy in a non-cooperative society. The time delay group would be non-cooperative because in non-cooperative societies deflection is the optimal solution in one-shot interactions. The results showed exactly that! Even this does not prove that cooperation is learned, however, it at least shows that even if cooperation was purely innate, the degree to which it varies depending on the context of the individual. What would be the extremes of the degrees? Can there be societies where it would be 100% or 0%? If so, could we truly say it is innate and learned? I do not think so. Nevertheless more research is needed to address these questions.

The debate continues as to whether social cooperation is innate or learned, however, perhaps the answer is more complex than either of these theories. I would like to argue that cooperation is in fact naturally occurring in human interactions. However, the environment and social context play a significant role in shaping the degree of cooperation that a particular individual will exhibit. In both studies analyzed in this paper, cooperation was always found regardless of age or country. In addition, in both studies it is determined that the context of the individuals played a significant role as to how much participants were willing to cooperate. I believe that any further study on cooperation needs to take into account the individual’s context, environment, and history. If with further research, it is proven that an individual’s environment promotes or hinders the development of cooperation, the consequences can be far reaching. This paper supports the idea that people cooperate innately, but when exposed to less cooperative environments, they become less cooperative. Therefore, I argue that cooperation is innate but hinges on the very important component of learning in one’s society and economic environment. It is necessary to study a diverse number of societies and focus on the extremes of cooperation. I believe that the more polarized these extremes are, the more significant the component of learning in one’s environment is.

The societal implications of this theory are far-reaching, because it addresses the ways in which we, as a collective society, organize our communities. Non-cooperative environments are associated with economic distress, low SES, or corrupt institutions. How fixed are non-cooperative environments therefore, when dependent upon external economic and social forces? For example, postal codes are highly predictive of an individual’s socioeconomic status and the intelligence and growth potential in a child. In general, lower SES is correlated with lower IQ grades in children and teenagers (von Stumm & Plomin, 2015).If in turn, researchers can also associate socioeconomic status with a higher rate of the negative, non-cooperative traits examined in this paper, how do we, as a collective society, restructure the forces that determine the social status children are born into and their ability to mobilize. Will cooperation become just another variable correlated to SES and have negative impact on people coming from a lower SES? My conclusion suggests that people in poverty have the capacity of expressing more cooperative behavior, but the environment they have lived in has not taught them better. It just shows yet another obstacle that the less fortunate need to overcome.

References:

• Amazon Mechanical Turk. (n.d.). Retrieved April 24, 2018, from https://www.mturk.com/
• Benenson, J. F., Pascoe, J., & Radmore, N. (2007). Children’s altruistic behavior in the dictator game. Evolution and Human Behavior, 28(3), 168–175. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2006.10.003
• Capraro, V., & Cococcioni, G. (2015). Social setting, intuition and experience in laboratory experiments interact to shape cooperative decision-making: Figure 1. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 282(1811), 20150237. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2015.0237
• Capraro, V., Jordan, J. J., & Rand, D. G. (2015). Heuristics guide the implementation of social preferences in one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma experiments. Scientific Reports, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep06790
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Best,

@capatazche