Humans work together in groups to tackle shared problems and contribute to local club goods that benefit other group members. Whereas benefits from club goods remain group bound, groups are often nested in overarching collectives that face shared problems like pandemics or climate change. Such challenges require individuals to cooperate across group boundaries, raising the question how cooperation can transcend beyond confined groups. Here, we show how frequent intergroup interactions allow groups to transition from group-bound to universal cooperation. With frequent intergroup interactions, reciprocity of cooperative acts permeates group boundaries and enables the evolution of universal cooperation. As soon as intergroup interactions take place frequently, people start to selectively reward cooperation aimed at benefitting everyone, irrespective of their group membership. Simulations further show that it becomes more difficult to overcome group-bound cooperation when populations are fragmented into many small groups. Our findings reveal important prerequisites for the evolution of universal cooperation.
Individuals often face dilemmas in which non-cooperation serves their self-interest and cooperation favors society at large. Cooperation is often considered the moral choice because it creates equality and fairness among citizens. Accordingly, individuals whose political ideology attaches greater value to equality than to agency and self-reliance should not only cooperate on more rather than less efficient public goods, but also more on public goods from which individuals benefit equally rather than unequally. We examine this possibility by comparing ideologically left-leaning and right-leaning individuals’ cooperation on multiple public goods that varied in efficiency and (in)equality in returns. We find that left-leaning individuals cooperate more than right-leaning ones, but only on public goods that benefit everyone equally, and not more on public goods that generate inequalities. Left-leaning individuals also trust and expect others to cooperate more on equal- versus unequal-returns public goods, while self-identified right-leaning individuals do not differentiate between these. Interestingly, ideology does not predict which public good is deemed more morally appropriate to cooperate on. Results combined specify when and why self-identified leftists can(not) be expected to cooperate more than rightists and reveal how moral decision-making depends on structural elements of the public good provision problems that citizens face.
The functioning of groups and societies requires that individuals cooperate on public goods such as healthcare and state defense. While psychological science has addressed cooperation and public good provision, it has largely ignored situations in which individuals face multiple public goods and must choose on which to cooperate. Such decisions can be difficult when public goods are attractive on one dimension (e.g., being ‘efficient’ in providing comparatively high returns) and unattractive on another (e.g., providing unequal rather than equal returns to group members). Here we examined (expectations about) cooperation in multiple-public good provision problems using four incentivized and preregistered experiments (N = 774). Participants simultaneously faced two public goods that varied in efficiency and (in)equality of returns. Results showed more cooperation on the comparatively efficient public good (Exp. 1) and on the equal-return (vs. unequal-return) public good. Crucially, however, when the unequal-returns public good was also the most efficient, individuals cooperated comparatively more on this unequal-but-efficient public good when they themselves benefitted the most from inequality (Exp. 2—4). Low beneficiaries largely ignored public good efficiency and preferentially cooperated on equal- rather than unequal-returns public goods. Consequently, groups encountering multiple-public good provision problems including an unequal-but-efficient-returns public good were most cooperative. Expectations (Exp. 2—4) as well as preferences for revising the multiple-public good provision problems’ choice architecture (Exp. 3—4) echoed these cooperation patterns. We discuss implications for theory and policy on cooperation.
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