ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
Correlated pay-offs are key to cooperation.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 49 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
49 citing papers in PubMed, 149 citations in OpenAlex.
- Coordination costs may counteract the positive effects of a larger group size in determining the winner of between-group conflicts.iScience · 2026Article
- Experience-dependent modulation of prosocial touch in mice.iScience · 2026Article
- Continuous dynamics of cooperation and competition in social decision-making.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Evolutionary parsimony: an equilibrium refinement that sharply constrains the space of outcomes in games with multiple equilibria.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Reciprocity evolves more readily in competitive than cooperative socio-ecologies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Division of labour as key driver of social evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Helping niches may trigger the development of task specialization and division of labour.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- The evolution of division of labour: preconditions and evolutionary feedback.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Pigs solve a cooperative task without showing a clear understanding of the need for a partner.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Is provisioning rate of parents and helpers influenced by the simulated presence of novel individuals?Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2025Article
- Exploring rodent prosociality: A conceptual framework.Translational neuroscience · 2025Review
- Norway rats recruit cooperation partners based on previous receipt of help while disregarding kinship.iScience · 2024Article
- Article
- Do pet dogs reciprocate the receipt of food from familiar and unfamiliar conspecifics?Ethology : formerly Zeitschrift fur Tierpsychologie · 2024Article
- Group Formation and the Evolution of Human Social Organization.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
- Article
- Assessment of help value affects reciprocation in Norway rats.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Apes reciprocate food positively and negatively.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Philopatry yields higher fitness than dispersal in a cooperative breeder with sex-specific life history trajectories.Science advances · 2023Article
- Evidence suggesting that reindeer mothers allonurse according to the direct reciprocity and generalized reciprocity decision rules.PloS one · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The general belief that cooperation and altruism in social groups result primarily from kin selection has recently been challenged, not least because results from cooperatively breeding insects and vertebrates have shown that groups may be composed mainly of non-relatives. This allows testing predictions of reciprocity theory without the confounding effect of relatedness. Here, we review complementary and alternative evolutionary mechanisms to kin selection theory and provide empirical examples of cooperative behaviour among unrelated individuals in a wide range of taxa. In particular, we focus on the different forms of reciprocity and on their underlying decision rules, asking about evolutionary stability, the conditions selecting for reciprocity and the factors constraining reciprocal cooperation. We find that neither the cognitive requirements of reciprocal cooperation nor the often sequential nature of interactions are insuperable stumbling blocks for the evolution of reciprocity. We argue that simple decision rules such as 'help anyone if helped by someone' should get more attention in future research, because empirical studies show that animals apply such rules, and theoretical models find that they can create stable levels of cooperation under a wide range of conditions. Owing to its simplicity, behaviour based on such a heuristic may in fact be ubiquitous. Finally, we argue that the evolution of exchange and trading of service and commodities among social partners needs greater scientific focus.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.