What is the extent and nature of religious prosociality? If religious prosociality exists, is it parochial and extended selectively to co-religionists, or is it generalized regardless of the recipient? Further, is it driven by preferences to help others or by expectations of reciprocity? We...

Recent work using decontextualized economic games suggests that cooperation is a dynamic decision-making process: automatic responses typically support cooperation on average, while deliberation leads to increased selfishness. Here we performed two studies examining how these temporal effects...

Actions such as sharing food and cooperating to reach a common goal have played a fundamental role in the evolution of human societies. Despite the importance of such good actions, little is known about if and how they can spread from person to person to person. For instance, does being...

Cooperation is fundamental to the evolution of human society. We regularly observe cooperative behaviour in everyday life and in controlled experiments with anonymous people, even though standard economic models predict that they should deviate from the collective interest and act so as to...

When faced with the chance to help someone in mortal danger, what is our first response? Do we leap into action, only later considering the risks to ourselves? Or must instinctive self-preservation be overcome by will-power in order to act? We investigate this question by examining the testimony...

A key element of human morality is prosocial behavior. Humans are unique among animals in their willingness to pay costs to benefit unrelated friends and strangers. This cooperation is a critical part of our identity as moral beings. Here, we ask why humans cooperate, and what can explain...

What makes people willing to pay costs to help others, and to punish others’ selfishness? Why does the extent of such behaviors vary markedly across cultures? To shed light on these questions, we explore the role of formal institutions in shaping individuals’ prosociality and punishment. In...

Cooperation is central to human existence, forming the bedrock of everyday social relationships and larger societal structures. Thus, understanding the psychological underpinnings of cooperation is of both scientific and practical importance. Recent work using a dual-process framework suggests...

We review two fundamentally different ways that decision time is related to cooperation. First, studies have experimentally manipulated decision time to understand how cooperation is related to the use of intuition versus deliberation. Current evidence supports the claim that time pressure (and,...

Recent studies suggest that cooperative decision-making in one-shot interactions is a history-dependent dynamic process: promoting intuition versus deliberation has typically a positive effect on cooperation (dynamism) among people living in a cooperative setting and with no previous experience...