ArticleScience advances2023
The evolution of universal cooperation.
Article in Science advances, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Evolutionary-Ecological Basis of Xenophilia.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- The co-occurrence of ingroup and outgroup prosociality requires cross-group partner choice.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Despotism promotes dyadic cooperation through enhanced interdependencies in non-human primate societies.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Assessing three altruism facets by economic games and self-report: a multitrait-multimethod investigation.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The effect of punishment on cooperation in a multilevel public goods game: compositional data analysis.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The co-occurrence of ingroup and outgroup prosociality across 121 societies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Free mobility across group boundaries promotes intergroup cooperation.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- How we manage medication-related osteonecrosis of the jaw.European journal of medical research · 2024Review
- Using artificial agents to nudge outgroup altruism and reduce ingroup favoritism in human-agent interaction.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Indirect reciprocity can foster large-scale cooperation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Reply to Gross et al.: Indirect reciprocity undermines large-scale cooperation under realistic conditions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- The nasty neighbor effect in humans.Science advances · 2024Article
- Indirect reciprocity undermines indirect reciprocity destabilizing large-scale cooperation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Group Formation and the Evolution of Human Social Organization.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
- Asymmetric cognitive learning mechanisms underlying the persistence of intergroup bias.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Article
- Discriminatory punishment undermines the enforcement of group cooperation.Scientific reports · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans work together in groups to tackle shared problems and contribute to local club goods that benefit other group members. Whereas benefits from club goods remain group bound, groups are often nested in overarching collectives that face shared problems like pandemics or climate change. Such challenges require individuals to cooperate across group boundaries, raising the question how cooperation can transcend beyond confined groups. Here, we show how frequent intergroup interactions allow groups to transition from group-bound to universal cooperation. With frequent intergroup interactions, reciprocity of cooperative acts permeates group boundaries and enables the evolution of universal cooperation. As soon as intergroup interactions take place frequently, people start to selectively reward cooperation aimed at benefitting everyone, irrespective of their group membership. Simulations further show that it becomes more difficult to overcome group-bound cooperation when populations are fragmented into many small groups. Our findings reveal important prerequisites for the evolution of universal cooperation.
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Registered trials
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.