Cooperation is a hallmark of human social life, spanning from simple acts of helping individuals to collaborative acts in which teams achieve outcomes that no single individual could achieve alone. However, the origins of these behaviors are unclear. Are humans initially driven by purely selfish motives and must be taught to be cooperative? Or do we have a biological predisposition for cooperation? How do humans learn to share a common resource according to what’s ‘fair’?
I will present a framework that derives hypotheses about the critical proximate mechanisms supporting cooperation from evolutionary theory. I propose that for cooperation to evolve, individuals have to possess two distinct sets of psychological skills: the ability to identify and create opportunities for cooperative interactions with others (creating benefit) and mechanisms to solve the free-rider problem to sustain cooperation as a viable strategy (distributing benefit).
To evaluate this framework, I will present empirical studies with children examining how these two sets of skills develop over childhood. In particular, while young children already possess basic skills to help others and share valuable resources, social norms and social experience begin to influence children’s cooperation in later ontogeny. These results are complemented by studies with chimpanzees to illuminate the extent to which these abilities are unique to humans, or shared with our evolutionary relatives. I conclude with a proposal of how this framework motivates new developmental, comparative, and cross-cultural research to shed light on the ontogenetic and phylogenetic roots of the psychological abilities underpinning human cooperation.