What explains variability in norms of cooperation across organizations and cultures? One answer comes from the internalization of norms prescribing behavior that is typically successful under the institutions that govern one's daily life. These norms are then carried over into atypical...

Understanding human cooperation is of major interest across the natural and social sciences. But it is unclear to what extent cooperation is actually a general concept. Most research on cooperation has implicitly assumed that a person's behavior in one cooperative context is related to their...

Cooperation is central to human societies. Yet relatively little is known about the cognitive underpinnings of cooperative decision-making. Does cooperation require deliberate self-restraint? Or is spontaneous prosociality reined in by calculating self-interest? Here we present a theory of why...

The human willingness to pay costs to benefit anonymous others is often explained by social preferences: rather than only valuing their own material payoff, people also care in some fashion about the outcomes of others. But how successful is this concept of outcome-based social preferences for...

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...

A large body of laboratory-based research suggests that people display substantial in-group bias even based on trivial groupings. We use the release of a popular augmented reality game Pokémon Go to study this phenomenon in a hybrid lab-field experiment. We analyze the behavior of over 900...