Beyond a binary theorizing of prosociality

Stylized experiments, the public goods game and its variants thereof, have taught us the peculiar reproducible fact that humans tend to cooperate (or contribute to shared resources) more than expected from economically rational assumptions. There have been two competing explanations for this phenomenon: Either cooperating is an innate human trait (the prosocial preference hypothesis) or a transitory effect while learning the game (the confused learner hypothesis). We use large-scale experimental data in the two-player version of the public goods game—the prisoner’s dilemma—from an experimental design to distinguish between these two hypotheses. By monitoring the effects of zealots (persistently cooperating bots) and varying the participants’ awareness of them, we find a considerably more complex scenario than previously reported. People indeed have a prosocial bias, but not to the degree that they always forego taking action to increase their profit. While our findings end the simplistic theorizing of prosociality, an observed positive, cooperative response to zealots has actionable policy implications.