Like ants, it is believed that the success of humans has been due to our ability to cooperate in large groups. Unlike other animals, people are able to work together in large groups and coordinate their actions to produce mutual benefits.
But we never quite buy into cooperation completely. We can all name instances where something did not go right and we knew it was because someone else was better connected and since it is Academy Awards this weekend a lot of filmmakers who created products specifically geared toward winning an award will find reasons they got denied (such as The Oscars: A Racist, Homophobic, Misogynistic Relic Of Our Heteronormative Past and that may lead them to behave more selfishly in the future, according to a social science paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).
Cooperation is of interest to both science and the so-called social sciences. Biologists wonder if cooperation could have evolved by natural selection, since cooperation can be beneficial even when it is possible to behave selfishly and take advantage of the cooperative efforts of your group. In the social world, psychologists and economists try to understand why many people are willing to sacrifice their own welfare to benefit their social environment.
Co-author Dr. Lucas Molleman of the School of Economics at The University of Nottingham, says, "The question that our research tries to answer is: 'How do people make decisions when their actions can affect the welfare of others?' More specifically, we want to know how people determine their behavior when they have to cooperate in groups."
In these situations, a beneficial outcome for the whole group can be achieved if everyone works together. Individually, however, people might be better off by making selfish choices. Because of the possibility of others taking a free ride, people pay close attention their fellow group mates when they make decisions. For instance, they cooperate if others also cooperate, but act selfishly when others do not cooperate.
To find out, 200 participants were invited to a computer lab at the University of Groningen. They were asked to make decisions that affected their earnings. Groups were formed in which the participants could choose between a selfish option (increasing their own earnings) and an option that benefited all members of their group. In between making their decisions, people could gather information about their fellow group members; about the choices of the majority and information about which option paid off best.
Dr Pieter Van Den Berg from the University of Groningen said, "From previous research we know that people differ quite strongly in what kind of information they are interested in: some people are 'majority-oriented' and tend to look at the behavior of the majority in their group, whereas others are 'success-oriented' and try to find out what kind of behavior pays off best. In this experiment we studied how these different types of people behave when they have to cooperate in groups."
Molleman concluded, "It turns out that behavior in groups of success-oriented people was much more selfish than groups of majority-oriented people. As a consequence, the people in the majority-oriented groups tended to earn more money in the experiment since they cooperated more."