Human Cooperation and the Crises of Climate Change, COVID-19, and Misinformation

Abstract

Contemporary society is facing many social dilemmas—including climate change, COVID-19, and misinformation—characterized by a conflict between short-term self-interest and longer-term collective interest. The climate crisis requires paying costs today to benefit distant others (and oneself) in the future. The COVID-19 crisis requires the less vulnerable to pay costs to benefit the more vulnerable in the face of great uncertainty. The misinformation crisis requires investing effort to assess truth and abstain from spreading attractive falsehoods. Addressing these crises requires an understanding of human cooperation. To that end, we present ( a) an overview of mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation, including mechanisms based on similarity and interaction; ( b) a discussion of how reputation can incentivize cooperation via conditional cooperation and signaling; and ( c) a review of social preferences that undergird the proximate psychology of cooperation, including positive regard for others, parochialism, and egalitarianism. We discuss the three focal crises facing our society through the lens of cooperation, emphasizing how cooperation research can inform our efforts to address them. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 73 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Did cooperation among strangers decline in the United States? A cross-temporal meta-analysis of social dilemmas (1956–2017).

“…Over the past several decades, theory and experimental research on impersonal cooperation has intensely focused on understanding behavior in social dilemmas (i.e., situations where there is a conflict between short-term personal gain and long-term collective gain; Dawes, 1980; Van Lange et al, 2013). In such situations, cooperation is broadly defined as behavior that benefits the group or collective but is costly for the individual (Rand & Nowak, 2013; Van Lange & Rand, 2022). Many theories have attempted to explain how people can solve social dilemmas, and empirical research has repeatedly placed people in experimental social dilemmas to study cooperative behavior.…”

“…In a typical PD (Rand & Nowak, 2013; Rapoport & Chammah, 1965a; Van Lange & Rand, 2022), two players simultaneously decide whether to cooperate or to defect with each other. If both players cooperate, they always receive a larger payoff (reward outcome [ R ]) than if both defect (punishment outcome [ P ]).…”

Too strong to care? Investigating the links between formidability, worldviews, and views on climate and disaster

“…We extended these past findings by examining whether these men would also hold worldviews that support the preservation of hierarchical, competitive social systems (e.g., justify the existing free market). Further, proposed actions to mitigate disasters and climate change often involve a sacrifice of one's own or in-group interests in the interest of the public good (i.e., heightened cooperativeness; see, e.g., Barclay & Barker, 2020;Van Lange & Rand, 2022), whereas highly formidable men are less inclined to concede their own or in-group interests (Muñoz-Reyes et al, 2020; and are possibly more reluctant to appear "weak" by compromising on these issues (Vandello & Bosson, 2013). Thus, we extended past work linking formidability to anti-egalitarianism by predicting that highly formidable men should be less likely to endorse social interventions that would mitigate disaster or climate change risk by reducing inequalities (e.g., by relocating the homeless prior to a flood event or by reducing fossil fuel consumption and unrestrained economic growth in favor of creating new green infrastructure).…”

Anticipatory Threat Mitigates the Break-Down of Group Cooperation

“…Humans, similar to other animals, react to threatening situations with neurophysiological changes that influence decision making (Fanselow & Lester, 1988;Roelofs, 2017). Whereas existing work on threat responding has mainly considered individual decision-making (Blanchard, Griebel, Pobbe, & Blanchard, 2011;Bradley, Codispoti, Cuthbert, & Lang, 2001;Fanselow & Lester, 1988;Roelofs, 2017), threats arising from climate change, contagious diseases and terrorist attacks typically affect and are experienced by groups of individuals whose behavioral responses influence not only their own, but also each other's welfare (Gross, Veistola, De Dreu, & Van Dijk, 2020;Van Lange & Rand, 2021). Unfortunately, however, we poorly understand how threat exposure and concomitant neurophysiological responses modulate group functioning.…”