ArticleNature human behaviour2021
Payoff-based learning best explains the rate of decline in cooperation across 237 public-goods games.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Punctuated decline of human cooperation.Nature · 2026Article
- Behavioural ecology in the twenty-first century.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Review
- Indirect punishment can outperform direct punishment in promoting cooperation in structured populations.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Beyond a binary theorizing of prosociality.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Resolving selfish and spiteful interdependent conflict.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Confusion cannot explain cooperative behavior in public goods games.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Expressed disapproval does not sustain long-term cooperation as effectively as costly punishment.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- The effect of intergroup competition outcome on ingroup cooperation: insights from the male warrior hypothesis.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Studying human culture with small datasets and evolutionary models.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The restart effect in social dilemmas shows humans are self-interested not altruistic.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Ancestral social environments plus nonlinear benefits can explain cooperation in human societies.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Article
- Evolutionary instability of selfish learning in repeated games.PNAS nexus · 2022Article
- Religious celibacy brings inclusive fitness benefits.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Four levers of reciprocity across human societies: concepts, analysis and predictions.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Review
- Self-interested learning is more important than fair-minded conditional cooperation in public-goods games.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
- A preference to learn from successful rather than common behaviours in human social dilemmas.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Decoupling cooperation and punishment in humans shows that punishment is not an altruistic trait.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
What motivates human behaviour in social dilemmas? The results of public goods games are commonly interpreted as showing that humans are altruistically motivated to benefit others. However, there is a competing 'confused learners' hypothesis: that individuals start the game either uncertain or mistaken (confused) and then learn from experience how to improve their payoff (payoff-based learning). Here we (1) show that these competing hypotheses can be differentiated by how they predict contributions should decline over time; and (2) use metadata from 237 published public goods games to test between these competing hypotheses. We found, as predicted by the confused learners hypothesis, that contributions declined faster when individuals had more influence over their own payoffs. This predicted relationship arises because more influence leads to a greater correlation between contributions and payoffs, facilitating learning. Our results suggest that humans, in general, are not altruistically motivated to benefit others but instead learn to help themselves.
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