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

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Humans' ability to reciprocate is one of the major mechanisms enabling cooperation. 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. Theories of cooperation that have been influential across many fields, including biology, psychology and economics, view reciprocity as a central component of human cooperation. Despite extensive theoretical work, however, little is known about the foundational psychological mechanisms that enable reciprocity. What features of the human mind enable us to engage in reciprocity? What are the cognitive abilities that make it possible for humans to cooperate in ways not found in other animals? We hypothesize that the cognitive abilities to plan for the future, to exert patience, and to tolerate a level of risk are fundamental psychological traits for reciprocity-based cooperation. The evolution of these cognitive skills are necessary prerequisites for reciprocity, which can explain the important role that cooperation plays in human societies and the distinctly human capacity to engage in cooperative interactions even in large groups of unrelated individuals. Furthermore, we suggest that a great amount of humans' variability to engage in reciprocal cooperation is due to individual differences in these cognitive skills. Hence, understanding the causes of individual variation in cooperation is a necessary step towards promoting and fostering cooperation between individuals.Based upon theoretical work and initial empirical evidence, we target future planning skills, patience, and risk tolerance as foundational capacities for reciprocity. Methodologically, we will combine three complementary lines of inquiry: One strand of research will assess the evolutionary basis of the human capacity for reciprocity, by studying chimpanzees as one of humans' closest primate relatives. Our hypothesis is that chimpanzees engage in reciprocal behaviour in limited ways because of differences in their ability to plan for the future, patience skills, and risk tolerance. A second strand of research will look at the emergence of reciprocal cooperation in children between 3 and 6 years of age. Evidence suggests that children acquire the capacity for reciprocal cooperation during this age-window, and we will test the hypothesis that this developmental emergence of reciprocity can be explained by changes in planning skills, patience, and changes in risk preferences. A third strand of experiments will 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 skills, patience, and risk tolerance. With this multidisciplinary approach, we will have the unique opportunity to identify the critical psychological mechanisms for human reciprocity. An important aspect of this research project is to translate the insights from basic research to develop programs that foster cooperation in society-at-large. In business, practitioners have come to realize the need for more collaborative approaches and are in urgent need of insights and guidelines to understand and promote collaborative working within and between organizations. For this reason, we will closely collaborate with the Institute for Collaborative Working (ICW), the organization behind the International Standard on Collaboration (ISO44001) that serves as the platform for firms to share best practices and benchmark effective collaborative working across different sectors. We will have regular meetings with representatives of the ICW to plan and strategize the use of this research as well as a final retreat where all researchers from the current project, international experts on cooperation research, and collaborators from the ICW will gather to discuss implications of the research findings.