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

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.

This project addresses a fundamental question for all those interested in human cooperation: which cognitive skills allow the emergence of and influence individuals' tendency to engage in reciprocal cooperation? Our multidisciplinary approach, testing chimpanzees, children and adult humans, widens the academic impact of the project because the findings will be of interest to scholars from several different fields. First, the experiments with chimpanzees will not only be a critical test for the role of these cognitive skills on reciprocity (because chimpanzees' cognitive skills are more limited), but the results will also be of great interest to comparative psychologists, primatologists and evolutionary anthropologists interested in the evolutionary roots of human cooperation and the evolution of social cognition. The experiments with children are also critical because they allow us to track the emergence of cooperation in relationship to developmental changes in cognition. As such, these results will be of great interest to developmental psychologists, but also to cognitive and social psychologists interested in the precursors of adult human behaviour. The work with adults is also critical because only then can we explore the relationship between these cognitive skills and the variability found in cooperation in adult humans. Given that reciprocity is a mutually beneficial form of cooperation that pays off in repeated interactions with others, it is individuals' rational self-interest to engage in it. The results will be of great interest to behavioural economists, social and cognitive psychologists because it taps into possible cognitive skills that prevent or influence cooperative behaviour.

As explained in the Pathways to Impact section the project will also directly impact practitioners from several fields. A better understanding of human psychology and the cognitive factors that contribute and support collaborative interactions is crucial to inform numerous initiatives to increase collaboration between humans. The Institute for Collaborative Working (ICW) is an organization that serves as a platform for firms to share best practices and benchmark effective collaborative working across different sectors. The tight collaboration with the ICW, Mr. Hawkins and Dr. Chakkol will allow translating the research findings into practical initiatives at the workplace and among businesses and organizations. The research results will be included in the ICW's executive training programmes, and we will have regular meetings with the ICW-collaborators to strategize and work together towards devising more collaborative practices in organizations. In our final workshop in the Shard (London), we will bring together academics and practitioners working on the topic of cooperation to facilitate communication and exchange of ideas between the two worlds.

In addition, the results from the studies with children will also be important for educators and parents. If we find evidence that reciprocal cooperation co-emerges with certain cognitive skills, interventions to support and accelerate the development of such skills can be put in place. For example, schools and parents can be advised to spend more time in activities that practise and require children to be patient, or games that encourage future planning (if, for example, patience and future planning turn-out to be critical).

Furthermore, university students and the wider public will also profit from this research in various forms. Undergraduate and postgraduate students will profit by participating in different phases of the data collection and analysis, and learning about all the steps involved in science production. The broader public will also learn about science through active participation in the research, via newsletters, educational talks and guided tours in the Chimpanzees Sanctuary, publication of op-ed pieces in newspapers, and short videos for non-academic audiences.