Benevolent characteristics promote cooperative behaviour among humans

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that benevolence, characterized by acts that increase others' welfare at a personal cost, is prevalent and causally linked to increased cooperation in humans, challenging standard economic models.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that benevolence exists widely and promotes cooperation, with experimental validation of a causal relationship through priming.

Findings

Benevolence is common among individuals.

Benevolence correlates with cooperative behavior.

Priming benevolence increases cooperation.

Abstract

Cooperation is fundamental to the evolution of human society. We regularly observe cooperative behaviour in everyday life and in controlled experiments with anonymous people, even though standard economic models predict that they should deviate from the collective interest and act so as to maximise their own individual payoff. However, there is typically heterogeneity across subjects: some may cooperate, while others may not. Since individual factors promoting cooperation could be used by institutions to indirectly prime cooperation, this heterogeneity raises the important question of who these cooperators are. We have conducted a series of experiments to study whether benevolence, defined as a unilateral act of paying a cost to increase the welfare of someone else beyond one's own, is related to cooperation in a subsequent one-shot anonymous Prisoner's dilemma. Contrary to the predictions of the widely used inequity aversion models, we find that benevolence does exist and a large majority of people behave this way. We also find benevolence to be correlated with cooperative behaviour. Finally, we show a causal link between benevolence and cooperation: priming people to think positively about benevolent behaviour makes them significantly more cooperative than priming them to think malevolently. Thus benevolent people exist and cooperate more.