Ancestral social environments plus nonlinear benefits can explain cooperation in human societies.

ABSTRACT: Human cooperation (paying a cost to benefit others) is puzzling from a Darwinian perspective, particularly in groups with strangers who cannot repay nor are family members. The beneficial effects of cooperation typically increase nonlinearly with the number of cooperators, e.g., increasing returns when cooperation is low and diminishing returns when cooperation is high. Such nonlinearity can allow cooperation between strangers to persist evolutionarily if a large enough proportion of the population are already cooperators. However, if a lone cooperator faces a conflict between the group's and its own interests (a social dilemma), that raises the question of how cooperation arose in the first place. We use a mathematically tractable evolutionary model to formalise a chronological narrative

SUBMITTER: Kristensen NP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9691629 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature