cooperation
Not Exactly Rocket Science
Tag archives for cooperation
Pay it forward? Cooperative behaviour spreads through a group, but so does cheating
Posted by Ed Yong on March 8, 2010 Ever wonder if acts of kindness or malice really do ripple outwards? If you give up a seat on a train to a stranger, do they go onto “pay it forward” to others? Likewise, if you steal someone’s seat, does the bad mood you engender topple over to other people like a set of malicious…
Small bird engineers uneasy alliance between hawk and treeshrew
Posted by Ed Yong on December 8, 2009 On Nicobar Island, in the Indian Ocean, a most unusual hunting party is searching for food. Through the branches of the forest, the tiny Nicobar treeshrew scuttles about searching for insects. They’re followed by the racket-tailed drongo, a small bird that picks off juicy morsels flushed out by the foraging treeshrews. So far, this isn’t…
Carrots trump sticks for fostering cooperation
Posted by Ed Yong on September 3, 2009 When it comes to encouraging people to work together for the greater good, carrots work better than sticks. That’s the message from a new study showing that rewarding people for good behaviour is better at promoting cooperation than punishing them for offences. David Rand from Harvard University asked teams of volunteers to play “public goods…
Globalisation increases cooperation at an international scale
Posted by Ed Yong on March 2, 2009 I live in London. According to Google Analytics, 96% of this blog’s readers make their homes in a different city and 91% live in another country altogether. The fact that most of you are reading this post at all is a symptom of the globalised state of the 21st century. Through telecommunications, the Internet, free…
Why punishment is worth it in the end
Posted by Ed Yong on December 4, 2008 Is punishment a destructive force that breaks societies or part of the very glue that holds them together? Last year, I blogged about two studies that tried to answer this question using similar psychological games. In both, volunteers played with tokens that were eventually exchanged for money. They had the option to either cooperate with…