Abstract
My interest in cooperation was present before I started investigating it in humans. The research on a cooperative breeder species, the common marmoset, made it clear to me that cooperation was not a straightforward phenomenon. Cooperators also competed with each other, and strived to gain advantage even in a group that depends on cooperation for its own survival. How should that happen in humans? Evolutionary theory offered, from my point of view, the best perspective to understand these apparently opposing behaviors. For many years, I looked at cooperation in children, using game theory as an instrument to gain some insights. An invitation to participate in a symposium on religious behavior inspired me to look at a behavior that often comes together with both cooperation and competition—group coalition. So, I used religion, or its absence, as the factor promoting cooperation. After almost 30 years studying cooperation, more than ten of them in humans, I believe I have unveiled some of the motives that lead both humans as well as marmosets to collaborate and to compete. I have also contributed to bring a biological perspective into Brazilian Psychology, which I consider as my greatest achievement.
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Notes
- 1.
It is important to emphasize that altruism, from an evolutionary point of view, has quite a different meaning to altruism from a moral point of view. This latter meaning refers to those behaviors that confers benefits to someone else. From an evolutionary perspective, a behavior is altruistic only when it benefits another individual at a cost for the actor’s fitness, in other words, for his/her survival and/or reproduction. Thus, an altruistic moral behavior may or may not be altruistic from an evolutionary perspective. House (2016) defines cooperation as the behavior that is costly to an actor, while benefiting other individuals. That definition may be entangled at times with that of pro-social behavior, which the same authors define as a behavior that brings benefits to others, as the cost to the actor may not always be clear.
- 2.
We usually think about humans and other vertebrates when discussing cooperation. Curiously enough, Griffin et al. in a paper from 2004, report cooperation among bacteria, which is enhanced when they belong to the same lineage, i.e., are related. Moreover, one of the better studied societies are those of eusocial insects, like ants and bees. Cooperation in these insects includes forsaking reproduction in favor of a queen and even dying for its community, which represented Darwin’s special difficulty. The occurrence of cooperation in bacteria and insects suggests that this trait may be much older, evolutionarily, than we could suppose.
- 3.
Direct reciprocity describes the willingness to cooperate in response to another’s cooperation. Indirect reciprocity, on the other hand, occurs when individuals help those that help others, in other words, those that have a good reputation.
- 4.
Brazilian ethical committees do not allow the use of money as a reward in scientific studies.
- 5.
Fitness, in evolutionary theory, is defined as the ability of an individual to survive, reproduce, and propagate its genes to the next generations.
- 6.
Nielsen et al. (2017) report that only 0.7% of published papers in top developmental Psychology journals described results from South and Central America populations, while English language-speaking countries and Europe represent 90%.
- 7.
Quilombolas are communities of former slaves that ran away in late nineteenth century in Brazil.
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Yamamoto, M.E. (2019). Cooperation from an Evolutionary Perspective. In: Koller, S. (eds) Psychology in Brazil. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11336-0_18
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