Human Cooperation and the Crises of Climate Change, COVID-19, and Misinformation

Abstract Contemporary society is facing many pressing challenges, including climate change, Covid-19, and misinformation. Here we illustrate how these three crises are each social dilemmas, 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 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, as well as resisting the temptation to spread attractive falsehoods. Addressing these crises therefore requires understanding human cooperation. To that end, we present (i) a brief overview of mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation, including mechanisms based on similarity (i.e., kinship, spatial selection, and group selection) and those based on interaction (i.e., direct reciprocity, reputation); (ii) a detailed discussion of how reputation can incentivize cooperation via conditional cooperation and signaling; and (iii) a review of social preferences that undergird the proximate psychology of cooperation, including positive regard for others (i.e., a cooperative orientation to others in general), parochialism (i.e., a cooperative orientation to ingroups, sometimes at a cost to outgroups or the collective as a whole), and egalitarianism (i.e., an orientation that seeks to reduce absolute differences in outcomes for self and others). We then discuss each of the three focal crises facing our society through the lens of cooperation, emphasizing how insights from cooperation research can inform efforts to address these crises.