Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-05T20:06:12.699Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

22 - The Ontogeny and Evolution of Cooperation

from Part VI - Evolution and Development

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2020

By
Sebastian Grüneisen  and
Emily Wyman
Edited by
Lance Workman ,
Will Reader  and
Jerome H. Barkow
Lance Workman
Affiliation:
University of South Wales
Will Reader
Affiliation:
Sheffield Hallam University
Jerome H. Barkow
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia
Get access

Summary

Striking examples of human cooperation include people donating blood, paying their taxes, and helping total strangers on the street. These are acts of altruistic cooperation – behaviors that benefit the collective at a cost to the individual. To many researchers, explaining altruistic behaviors is central to understanding human cooperative uniqueness (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2003; Gintis et al., 2005), with the central question being how the fruits of cooperation can be enjoyed without being exploited by individuals who free-ride on the benevolent actions of others while not contributing themselves. Over recent decades, substantial advances have been made in identifying the factors that sustain cooperation in this context (Camerer, 2011; Hammerstein, 2003; Milinski, Semmann, & Krambeck, 2002). Here, we take a different approach and argue that an equally fundamental challenge of cooperation is for individuals to coordinate their behavior in order to generate mutual benefits (the “forgotten problem of cooperation”.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior , pp. 265 - 275
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alvard, M., & Nolin, D. (2002). Rousseau’s whale hunt? Coordination among big-game hunters. Current Anthropology, 43, 533–559.Google Scholar
Bacharach, M. (2006). Beyond Individual Choices: Teams and Frames in Game Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bakeman, R., & Adamson, L. B. (1984). Coordinating attention to people and objects in mother–infant and peer–infant interaction. Child Development, 55, 1278–1289.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Benozio, A., & Diesendruck, G. (2017). Parochial compliance: Young children’s biased consideration of authorities’ preferences regarding intergroup interactions. Child Development, 88, 1527–1535.Google Scholar
Bicchieri, C. (2006). The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Boehm, C. (1999). Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Boyd, R., Gintis, H., & Bowles, S. (2010). Coordinated punishment of defectors sustains cooperation and can proliferate when rare. Science, 328, 617–620.Google Scholar
Bratman, M. (1992). Shared cooperative activity. Psychological Review, 101, 327–341.Google Scholar
Bräuer, J., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2005). All great ape species follow gaze to distant locations and around barriers. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 119, 145–154.Google Scholar
Bullinger, A. F., Melis, A. P., & Tomasello, M. (2011). Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, prefer individual over collaborative strategies towards goals. Animal Behaviour, 82, 1135–1141.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, L. P., & Walton, G. M. (2013). The opportunity to collaborate increases preschoolers’ motivation for challenging tasks. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 116, 953–961.Google Scholar
Calcott, B. (2008). The other cooperation problem: Generating benefit. Biology & Philosophy, 23, 179–203.Google Scholar
Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2007). The Gestural Communication of Apes and Monkeys. Manhaw, NJ: LEA.Google Scholar
Call, J., Hare, B., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M. (2004). “Unwilling” versus “unable”: Chimpanzees’ understanding of human intentional action. Developmental Science, 7, 488–498.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Camerer, C. F. (2011). Behavioral Game Theory: Experiments in Strategic Interaction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Cameron, J. A., Alvarez, J. M., Ruble, D. N., & Fuligni, A. J. (2001). Children’s lay theories about ingroups and outgroups: Reconceptualizing research on prejudice. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5, 118–128.Google Scholar
Carpenter, M., & Call, J. (2013). How joint is the joint attention of chimpanzees and human infants? In Terrace, H. S. & Metcalfe, J., eds., Agency and Joint Attention. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 49–61.Google Scholar
Carpenter, M., & Liebal, K. (2011). Joint attention, communication, and knowing together in infancy. In Seemann, A., ed., Joint Attention: New Developments. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 159–181.Google Scholar
Carpenter, M., Nagell, K., & Tomasello, M. (1998). Social cognition, joint attention, and communicative competence from 9 to 15 months of age. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 63, 1–143.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Carpenter, M., Tomasello, M., & Striano, T. (2005). Role reversal imitation and language in typically developing infants and children with autism. Infancy, 8, 253–278.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, H. H. (1996). Using Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Debove, S., André, J. B., & Baumard, N. (2015). Partner choice creates fairness in humans. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 282, 20150392.Google Scholar
Debove, S., Baumard, N., & André, J. B. (2015). Evolution of equal division among unequal partners. Evolution, 69, 561–569.Google Scholar
Doebeli, M., & Hauer, C. (2005). Models of cooperation based on the prisoner’s dilemma and the snowdrift game. Ecology Letters, 8, 748–766.Google Scholar
Duguid, S., Wyman, E., Bullinger, A. F., Herfurth-Majstorovic, K., & Tomasello, M. (2014). Coordination strategies of chimpanzees and human children in a Stag Hunt game. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 281, 20141973.Google Scholar
Dunham, Y., Baron, A. S., & Carey, S. (2011). Consequences of “minimal” group affiliations in children. Child Development, 82, 793–811.Google Scholar
Fehr, E., & Fischbacher, U. (2003). The nature of human altruism. Nature, 425, 785–791.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fehr, E., & Fischbacher, U. (2004). Third-party punishment and social norms. Evolution and Human Behavior, 25, 63–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fehr, E., Bernhard, H., & Rockenbach, B. (2008). Egalitarianism in young children. Nature 454, 1079–1084.Google Scholar
Fletcher, G. E., Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2012). Differences in cognitive processes underlying the collaborative activities of children and chimpanzees. Cognitive Development, 27, 136–153.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilbert, M. (1989). On Social Facts. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Gilbert, M. (1996). Living Together: Rationality, Sociality, and Obligation. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Gilbert, M. (2008). Social convention revisited. Topoi, 27, 5–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gintis, H., Bowles, S., Boyd, R., & Fehr, E., eds. (2005). Moral Sentiments and Material Interests. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Göckeritz, S., Schmidt, M. F. H., & Tomasello, M. (2014). Young children’s creation and transmission of social norms. Cognitive Development, 30, 81–95.Google Scholar
Goldvicht-Bacon, E., & Diesendruck, G. (2016). Children’s capacity to use cultural focal points in coordination problems. Cognition, 149, 95–103.Google Scholar
Gräfenhain, M., Behne, T., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M. (2009). Young children’s understanding of joint commitments. Developmental Psychology, 45, 1430–1443.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Grueneisen, S., & Tomasello, M. (2017). Children coordinate in a social dilemma by taking turns and along dominance asymmetries. Developmental Psychology, 53, 265–273.Google Scholar
Grueneisen, S., & Tomasello, M. (2019). Children use rules to coordinate in a social dilemma. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 179, 362–374.Google Scholar
Grueneisen, S., Wyman, E., & Tomasello, M. (2015a). Children use salience to solve coordination problems. Developmental Science, 18, 495–501.Google Scholar
Grueneisen, S., Wyman, E., & Tomasello, M. (2015b). Conforming to coordinate: Children use majority information for peer coordination. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 33, 136–147.Google Scholar
Grueneisen, S., Wyman, E., & Tomasello, M. (2015c). “I know you don’t know I know …” Children use second-order false-belief reasoning for peer coordination. Child Development, 86, 287–293.Google Scholar
Hamann, K., Warneken, F., Greenberg, J. R., & Tomasello, M. (2011). Collaboration encourages equal sharing in children but not in chimpanzees. Nature, 476, 328–331.Google Scholar
Hamann, K., Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2012). Children’s developing commitments to joint goals. Child Development, 83, 137–145.Google Scholar
Hammerstein, P., ed. (2003). Genetic and Cultural Evolution of Cooperation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Hardecker, S., Schmidt, M. F. H., & Tomasello, M. (2017). Children’s developing understanding of the conventionality of rules. Journal of Cognition and Development, 18, 163–188.Google Scholar
Hare, B. (2017). Survival of the friendliest: Homo sapiens evolved via selection for prosociality. Annual Review of Psychology, 68, 155–186.Google Scholar
Hare, B., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2001). Do chimpanzees know what conspecifics know and do not know? Animal Behaviour, 61, 139–151.Google Scholar
Haun, D. B. M., Rekers, Y., & Tomasello, M. (2012). Majority-biased transmission in chimpanzees and human children, but not orangutans. Current Biology, 22, 727–731.Google Scholar
Haun, D. B. M., Rekers, Y., & Tomasello, M. (2014). Children conform to the behavior of peers; other great apes stick with what they know. Psychological Science, 25, 2160–2167.Google Scholar
Hirata, S., & Fuwa, K. (2007). Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) learn to act with other individuals in a cooperative task. Primates, 48, 13–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horner, V., & Whiten, A. (2005). Causal knowledge and imitation/emulation switching in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and children (Homo sapiens). Animal Cognition, 8, 164–181.Google Scholar
Kaminski, J., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2008). Chimpanzees know what others know but not what they believe. Cognition, 109, 224–234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Karg, K., Schmelz, M., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2015). Chimpanzees strategically manipulate what others can see. Animal Cognition, 18, 1069–1076.Google Scholar
Kinzler, K. D., Dupoux, E., & Spelke, E. S. (2007). The native language of social cognition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104, 12577–12580.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Leavens, D. A., Hopkins, W. D., & Thomas, R. K. (2004). Referential communication by chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Journal of Comparative Psychology, 118, 48–57.Google Scholar
Lewis, D. (1969). Convention: A Philosophical Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Liszkowski, U., Carpenter, M., Henning, A., Striano, T., & Tomasello, M. (2004). Twelve-month-olds point to share attention and interest. Developmental Science, 7, 297–307.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lyons, D. E., Young, A. G., & Keil, F. C. (2007). The hidden structure of overimitation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104, 19751–19756.Google Scholar
Mehta, J., Starmer, C., & Sugden, R. (1994). The nature of salience: An experimental investigation. American Economic Review, 84, 658–673.Google Scholar
Melis, A. P., Hare, B., & Tomasello, M. (2006). Engineering cooperation in chimpanzees: Tolerance constraints on cooperation. Animal Behaviour, 72, 275–286.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Melis, A. P., Grocke, P., Kalbitz, J., & Tomasello, M. (2016). One for you, one for me: Humans’ unique turn-taking skills. Psychological Science, 27, 987–996.Google Scholar
Milinski, M., Semmann, D., & Krambeck, H. J. (2002). Reputation helps solve the “Tragedy of the Commons”. Nature, 415, 424–426.Google Scholar
Milward, S., Kita, S., & Apperly, I. A. (2014). The development of co-representation effects in a joint task: Do children represent a co-actor? Cognition, 132, 269–279.Google Scholar
Moll, H., Richter, N., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M. (2008). Fourteen-month-olds know what “we” have shared in a special way. Infancy, 13, 90–101.Google Scholar
Ostrom, E. (2000). Collective action and the evolution of social norms. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 14, 137–158.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peacocke, C. (2005). Joint attention: Its nature, reflexivity, and relation to common knowledge. In Eilan, N., Hoerl, C., McCormack, T., & Roessler, J., eds., Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 298–324.Google Scholar
Raihani, N. J., & Bshary, R. (2011). The evolution of punishment in n-player games: A volunteer’s dilemma. Evolution, 65, 2725–2728.Google Scholar
Rakoczy, H., Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2008). The sources of normativity: Young children’s awareness of the normative structure of games. Developmental Psychology, 44, 875–881.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rapoport, A., & Chammah, A. M. (1966). The game of chicken. American Behavioral Scientist, 10, 10–28.Google Scholar
Rekers, Y., Haun, D. B. M., & Tomasello, M. (2011). Children, but not chimpanzees, prefer to collaborate. Current Biology, 21, 1756–1758.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schelling, T. (1960). The Strategy of Conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Schmelz, M., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2011). Chimpanzees know that others make inferences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108, 3077–3079.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schmidt, M. F. H., Rakoczy, H., & Tomasello, M. (2011). Young children attribute normativity to novel actions without pedagogy or normative language. Developmental Science, 14, 530–539.Google Scholar
Schmidt, M. F. H., Rakoczy, H., & Tomasello, M. (2012). Young children enforce social norms selectively depending on the violator’s group affiliation. Cognition, 124, 325–333.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schmidt, M. F. H., Butler, L. P., Heinz, J., & Tomasello, M. (2016). Young children see a single action and infer a social norm: Promiscuous normativity in 3-year-olds. Psychological Science, 27, 1360–1370.Google Scholar
Schneider, A. -C., Melis, A. P., & Tomasello, M. (2012). How chimpanzees solve collective action problems. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 279, 4946–4954.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Searle, J. R. (1990). Collective intentions and actions. In Cohen, P. R., Morgan, J., & Pollack, M. E., eds., Intentions in Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 227–241.Google Scholar
Searle, J. R. (1995). The Construction of Social Reality. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Thomas, K. A., DeScioli, P., Haque, O. S., & Pinker, S. (2014). The psychology of coordination and common knowledge. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 107, 657–676.Google Scholar
Tollefsen, D. (2005). Let’s pretend! Children and joint action. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 35, 75–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M. (1995). Joint attention as social cognition. In Moore, C. & Dunham, P. J., eds., Joint Attention: Its Origins and Role in Development. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 103–130.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2016). A Natural History of Human Morality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M., & Carpenter, M. (2005). The emergence of social cognition in three young chimpanzees. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 70, vii–132.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M., Carpenter, M., Call, J., Behne, T., & Moll, H. (2005). Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28, 675–735.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M., Melis, A., Tennie, C., Wyman, E., & Herrmann, E. (2012). Two key steps in the evolution of human: The interdependence hypothesis. Current Anthropology, 53, 673–692.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tomonaga, M., Tanaka, M., Matsuzawa, T., et al. (2004). Development of social cognition in infant chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes): Face recognition, smiling, gaze, and the lack of triadic interactions. Japanese Psychological Research, 46, 227–235.Google Scholar
Trevarthen, C. (1979). Communication and cooperation in early infancy. A description of primary intersubjectivity. In Bullowa, M., ed., Before Speech: The Beginning of Human Communication. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 321–347.Google Scholar
Turner, J. (1997). The Institutional Order: Economy, Kinship, Religion, Polity, Law, and Education in Evolutionary and Comparative Perspective. New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Warneken, F., Chen, F., & Tomasello, M. (2006). Cooperative activities in young children and chimpanzees. Child Development, 77, 640–663.Google Scholar
Warneken, W., Lohse, K., Melis, A. P., & Tomasello, M. (2011). Young children share the spoils after collaboration. Psychological Science, 22, 267–273.Google Scholar
Warneken, F., Gräfenhain, M., & Tomasello, M. (2012). Collaborative partner or social tool? New evidence for young children’s understanding of joint intentions in collaborative activities. Developmental Science, 15, 54–61.Google Scholar
Wyman, E. (2014). Language and collective fiction: From children’s pretense to social institutions. In Lewis, J., Knight, C., & Dor, D., eds., The Social Origins of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 171–183.Google Scholar
Wyman, E., Rakoczy, H., & Tomasello, M. (2009). Normativity and context in young children’s pretend play. Cognitive Development, 24, 146–155.Google Scholar
Wyman, E., Rakoczy, H., & Tomasello, M. (2013). Non-verbal communication enables coordination with others in a children’s “Stag Hunt” game. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 10, 597–610.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×