On the origin and nature of human cooperation

Jean-Baptiste André

Institut des Sciences de l'Evolution de Montpellier (CNRS-UMR 5554)

(Talk in English)

In this talk, I will raise (and try to answer) two questions regarding human cooperation: Why we cooperate the way we do (and not differently)? And why other species do not cooperate as much? I will first present models showing that the possibility to choose our social partner(s) constrains the way we cooperate, forcing us to give others as much as they could have obtained with a different partner. This simple principle explains some important properties of human cooperation —properties that human beings call fairness. I will then present further models, together with results from evolutionary robotics simulations, that explain why this form of cooperation, based on fair reciprocity, has not appeared more often in evolution, and that help make sense of the specific instances in which it occurs outside humans.

Recent publications:

André (2015) Contingency in the Evolutionary Emergence of Reciprocal Cooperation. Am. Nat. 185.

Debove et al. (2015) Evolution of equal division among unequal partners. Evolution 69.

Debove et al. (2015) Partner choice creates fairness in humans. Proceedings of the Roy. Soc. B 282.

André and Nolfi (in press). Robots don’t reciprocate and this could explain why few animals do. Scientific Reports.