SBE-RCUK Lead Agency: The Cognitive Foundations of Human Reciprocity

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Reciprocity is one of the major skills that enable humans to cooperate with others. When individuals take turns cooperating in a reciprocal fashion, they are better off in the long-term than individuals who care only about their own immediate benefit. However, little is known about the psychological skills needed. What features of the human mind enable us to engage in reciprocity? How can we explain when individuals are more or less cooperative? This project is focused on three psychological abilities that are hypothesized to be critical for reciprocity: The ability to plan for the future, to exercise patience, and to tolerate a level of risk. Measuring these abilities will facilitate understanding fundamental aspects of human cooperation and developing strategies needed to foster cooperation in daily social interactions, including the work environment. This project will examine reciprocity as it first emerges in development (by studying children), it will also examine reciprocity within the context of human evolution (by comparing human abilities to those of chimpanzees). To assess why some individuals are more cooperative than others, the project tests individual differences in reciprocal behavior across adults. An important aspect of this research project is to translate the insights about the basic skills for reciprocity into programs that foster cooperation in society-at-large. In business, practitioners have come to realize the need for more cooperative approaches and are in urgent need of guidelines to promote cooperative work in organizations; therefore, the researchers will partner with the Institute for Collaborative Working, an organization that develops executive training for collaborative working in industry.The project will use a battery of validated tests to determine the degree to which future planning, patience, and risk tolerance are the foundational skills required for reciprocity-based cooperation. The project will integrate three complementary lines of inquiry. One line will assess the evolutionary basis of the human capacity for reciprocity by studying chimpanzees as one of humans? closest primate relatives. This will test the hypothesis that chimpanzees reciprocate in limited ways because of differences in future planning, patience, and risk tolerance. A second line of inquiry will trace the emergence of reciprocity in children between 3 and 6 years of age. This will enable the researchers to test whether the emergence of reciprocity can be explained by developmental changes in the three component abilities. A third line involves experiments designed to examine individual differences among human adults in their tendency to engage in reciprocal cooperation -- measuring whether variability in reciprocity can be explained by differences in future planning, patience, and risk tolerance. Researchers will meet with key members of the Institute for Collaborative Working and international scholars to discuss the findings and their implications for fostering cooperative interactions in the work place.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.