Department of Economics, London School of Economics, London, UK.
Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway.
Sci Rep. 2023 Mar 17;13(1):4457. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-31691-9.
Cooperation is one of the most advantageous strategies to have evolved in small- and large-scale human societies, often considered essential to their success or survival. We investigated how cooperation and the mechanisms influencing it change across the lifespan, by assessing cooperative choices from adolescence to old age (12-79 years, N = 382) forcing participants to decide either intuitively or deliberatively through the use of randomised time constraints. As determinants of these choices, we considered participants' level of altruism, their reciprocity expectations, their optimism, their desire to be socially accepted, and their attitude toward risk. We found that intuitive decision-making favours cooperation, but only from age 20 when a shift occurs: whereas in young adults, intuition favours cooperation, in adolescents it is reflection that favours cooperation. Participants' decisions were shown to be rooted in their expectations about other people's cooperative behaviour and influenced by individuals' level of optimism about their own future, revealing that the journey to the cooperative humans we become is shaped by reciprocity expectations and individual predispositions.
合作是小型和大型人类社会中进化出的最有利策略之一，通常被认为是它们成功或生存的关键。我们通过评估从青春期到老年（12-79 岁，N=382）的合作选择来研究合作和影响合作的机制如何随年龄变化，迫使参与者通过随机时间限制来进行直觉或深思熟虑的决策。作为这些选择的决定因素，我们考虑了参与者的利他主义水平、互惠期望、乐观程度、对社会认可的渴望以及对风险的态度。我们发现，直觉决策有利于合作，但仅在 20 岁时发生转变：在年轻成年人中，直觉有利于合作，而在青少年中，合作则是深思熟虑的结果。参与者的决策源于他们对他人合作行为的期望，并受到个人对未来乐观程度的影响，这表明我们成为合作人类的旅程是由互惠期望和个人倾向塑造的。
