Tuesday, December 01, 2009

why we cooperate

It's a little hard for me to believe these days, but cooperation seems to be built in http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01human.html

Perhaps it's time to behave more like children.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Correct! So the remaining question is what is the subject of cooperation ?

Scott Lewis said...

Hi Pierre,

In response to your question...I think that cooperation is clearly the right strategy/effective when the situation is *non-zero sum*. That is, when everyone can gain from cooperating (non-zero sum), everyone can gain by cooperating. For an interesting analysis of cooperation that I've recently been influenced by, see Evolution of Cooperation.