Understanding the roots of human cooperation among strangers is of great importance for solving pressing social dilemmas and maintening public goods in human societies. We study the development of cooperation in 929 young children, aged 3 to 6. In a unified experimental framework, we examine...

Understanding the roots of human cooperation among strangers is of great importance for solving pressing social dilemmas and maintening public goods in human societies. We study the development of cooperation in 929 young children, aged 3 to 6. In a unified experimental framework, we examine...

This paper investigates the importance of concerns about intentions and outcomes in a sequential prisoner’s dilemma game with nature. In the game, there is a chance that the first mover’s choice is reversed. This allows the separation of intended actions from the resulting outcomes....

We study the development of cooperation in 929 young children, aged 3 to 6. In a unified experimental framework, we examine pre-registered hypotheses about which of three fundamental pillars of human cooperation – direct and indirect reciprocity, and third-party punishment – emerges earliest...

An often-replicated result in the experimental literature on social dilemmas is that a large share of subjects reveal conditionally cooperative preferences. Cooperation generated by this type of preferences is notoriously unstable, as individuals reduce their contributions to the public good in...

Despite the accumulation of research on indirect reciprocity over the past 30 years and the publication of over 100,000 related papers, there are still many issues to be addressed. Here, we look back on the research that has been done on indirect reciprocity and identify the issues that have...

Repeated interactions provide a prominent but paradoxical hypothesis for human cooperation in one-shot interactions. Intergroup competitions provide a different hypothesis that is intuitively appealing but heterodox. We show that neither mechanism reliably supports the evolution of cooperation...

Intensive studies on indirect reciprocity have explored rational assessment rules for maintaining cooperation and several have demonstrated the effects of the stern-judging rule. Uchida and Sasaki demonstrated that the stern-judging rule is not suitable for maintaining cooperative regimes in...