Human Cooperation and the Crises of Climate Change, COVID-19, and Misinformation
Top Cited Papers
- 4 January 2022
- journal article
- review article
- Published by Annual Reviews in Annual Review of Psychology
- Vol. 73 (1), 379-402
- https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-020821-110044
Abstract
Contemporary society is facing many social dilemmas—including climate change, COVID-19, and misinformation—characterized by a conflict between short-term self-interest and longer-term collective interest. The climate crisis requires paying costs today to benefit distant others (and oneself) in the future. The COVID-19 crisis requires the less vulnerable to pay costs to benefit the more vulnerable in the face of great uncertainty. The misinformation crisis requires investing effort to assess truth and abstain from spreading attractive falsehoods. Addressing these crises requires an understanding of human cooperation. To that end, we present (a) an overview of mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation, including mechanisms based on similarity and interaction; (b) a discussion of how reputation can incentivize cooperation via conditional cooperation and signaling; and (c) a review of social preferences that undergird the proximate psychology of cooperation, including positive regard for others, parochialism, and egalitarianism. We discuss the three focal crises facing our society through the lens of cooperation, emphasizing how cooperation research can inform our efforts to address them. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 73 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.Keywords
This publication has 126 references indexed in Scilit:
- Powering up with indirect reciprocity in a large-scale field experimentProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013
- Injustice for All or Just for Me? Social Value Orientation Predicts Responses to Own Versus Other’s ProceduresPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2012
- Dynamic social networks promote cooperation in experiments with humansProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2011
- Construal-level theory of psychological distance.Psychological Review, 2010
- Positive Interactions Promote Public CooperationScience, 2009
- Globalization and human cooperationProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2009
- Gossip as an alternative for direct observation in games of indirect reciprocityProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2007
- Partner choice creates competitive altruism in humansProceedings. Biological sciences, 2006
- Five Rules for the Evolution of CooperationScience, 2006
- The genetical evolution of social behaviour. IIJournal of Theoretical Biology, 1964