Cooperativeness

A team of German researchers recently published a study on cooperativeness, focusing on how cooperative people actually are versus how cooperative they assume their fellow human beings will be.

The study is predicated on experiments that included more than 100,000 subjects from 125 countries, and it involved pairing subjects with a stranger from the same country and asking them to choose between cooperate and do not cooperate options. The do not cooperate option would give them a guaranteed payout of $100, while the cooperate option would only yield $70. If both people, the subject and someone from their own country who they don’t know, chose to cooperate, though, an additional $400 would be donated to climate change causes in addition to the $70 they would both receive.