Introduction

How will humans decide to address today's "Grand Challenges" of resource depletion, climate change, ethnic and religious conflict, and natural and man-made disasters? Grand Challenge problem-solving will demand an unprecedented degree of cooperative effort and effective policies based on well-grounded theories of human nature and of cooperation. Yet, as I searched through the relevant literatures I was disappointed to find inconsistent ideas and research methods, even disagreements about the kinds of questions we need to be asking about humans and about cooperation.

The key barrier to cooperation research is the lack of coordinated efforts between a camp of collective action theorists and a camp of evolutionary psychologists. Differences are evident between the two camps even in something as basic as the questions: What is the nature of cooperation, and what is the goal of cooperation research? Collective action theorists understand cooperation to be a particularly difficult challenge for humans owing, in large part, to the tension that may arise between individual and group interests. Much of their research and theory-building has aimed at learning how humans confront cooperator problems through the construction of institutions (rules and associated forms of social organization and culture) that can foster cooperative behavior.

Unlike the collective action theorists, to evolutionary psychologists cooperation is not a serious problem because, when required, it arises spontaneously as an expression of a prosocial psychology. Thus evolutionary psychologists ignore institution-building, and, while some may consider the importance of culture, ultimately they understand cooperation to result from instincts that have a deep evolutionary history in our species. As a result, they pay little attention to the "proximate" time frame of collective action theory, which addresses how humans solve cooperator problems in particular social and cultural settings. To evolutionary psychologists, the key research question pertains to the "ultimate" sources of cooperation, namely, how did humans evolve into a "groupish" species over hundreds of thousands of years of bioevolutionary history?

In this and later chapters of this book I tilt strongly toward collective action theory, but always from a critical perspective toward both collective action and evolutionary psychology. I find collective action theory superior to evolutionary psychology for a number of reasons, chiefly because its theoretical proposals can be evaluated in the light of data gathered from real human experience, a way of thinking and working that is in line with the expectations of scientific epistemology. I find this empirical dimension admirable. At the same time, I fault the collective action literature for its tendency to emphasize Western historical experience. I also fault its lack of ability to link cooperation to the psychological foundations of human thought and social action — the human nature question. Evolutionary psychologists do bring psychological factors into the conversation about cooperation. Yet, I find their highly formal methodologies, which depend heavily on experimental game research and computer simulations, unable to match the complexity of real human psychology or of social experience that we find outside the sterile confines of the lab or the computer screen.

THE LIMITATIONS OF PREVAILING COOPERATION THEORIES AND A CALL FOR REVISION

Some researchers have attempted to overcome the divide between empirical and formal (by which I mean experimental game and computer modeling) approaches to cooperation research by presenting both side by side. However, this strategy has not been successful, in my view, even in the writing of some of the bright lights of cooperation studies such as Russell Hardin, Dennis Chong, and Elinor Ostrom (who won the Nobel prize in economics for her work on the collective management of resources). The difficulty I see is an uneasy tension between an empirical dimension, consisting of narrative accounts drawn from particular ethnographic or historical examples, and a formal dimension, the latter based on mathematical modeling and experimental games. The problem is that narrative and formal modes of presentation are highly dissimilar forms of knowledge that are not well integrated.

Oddly, it is often the case that while the narrative accounts document successful instances of cooperation, formal analyses often point to how cooperation is unlikely. For example, computer simulations show that cooperation is not likely to evolve biologically, a perhaps counterintuitive finding that has engaged the imagination of the evolutionary psychology community and prompted much new research that I describe in chapter 2. Similarly, experimental games show that based on the rational decisions of individuals (a characteristic feature of most experimental game research), highly cooperative outcomes are uncommon. For example, in "public goods games" players selfishly strategize to "free-ride" to gain individual benefit from pooled resources. And, in these games, if cooperation does appear, it usually is not sustained and may even decline within games and across multiple repeated games, again, owing to the free-rider problem. And yet, humans have sometimes built cooperative social formations in the real world, away from the game-playing laboratory, some of which have been sustained over long periods. This says to me that the emphasis placed on experimental games as a path to understanding cooperation may be misplaced.

As I mentioned, in the cooperation literature we often encounter formal analyses interspersed with narrative accounts based on ethnographic or historical sources. Typically I find the latter compelling and useful, while, at the same time, I realize that the description of selected isolated examples fails to realize the important goal of placing cooperation study on a firm foundation of scientific understanding. In spite of this shortcoming, what I find worth noting in these narratives is the way that institutions form a bridge between the individual, who is tempted...