Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Humans are remarkably cooperative, we provide help and share resources, often at a significant cost to ourselves. Human cooperation is unparalleled in the animal kingdom leaving a complex puzzle to explain the origins of this uniquely human trait. One explanation for the persistence of these costly behaviors is that cooperative preferences evolved in the context of group living to provide fitness benefits to both groups and their constituents. In this case cooperative preferences may be a natural disposition of human psychology that emerges through learning independent processes. Alternatively, social preferences that motivate cooperative behaviors may be constructed through learning dependent processes that shape their manifestation from the onset. My goal for this program of research is to explore the role of learning in the emergence of early cooperative preferences. We will focus on two forms of cooperation: helping and fairness. Mounting evidence suggests that by the middle of the first year of life infants show a robust preference for agents who provide help over those who harm or hinder others. By the end of the first year, infants also expect that resources will be divided equally, suggesting a nascent preference for fairness. The early emergence of these cooperative preferences suggests that they emerge through learning independent processes. Yet, there is a confluence of evidence to suggest that in the first year of life infants are learning about their environments and developing adaptive preferences that allow them to become functioning members of their group during this developmental period. Thus, while a great deal of progress has been made in illuminating the ontogenetic emergence and nature of cooperative preferences in infancy, it remains to be elucidated whether learning plays a foundational role in shaping this process. This program of research will take a convergent approach to examine the extent to which cooperative preferences emerge through learning dependent and/or independent processes. First, we will assess if the emergence of cooperative preferences is independent of learning processes and/or is shaped by prepared learning processes. This research will be the first to explicitly investigate the extent to which cooperative preferences can be learned and modified through learning experience, a crucial piece of evidence if we are to understand the origins of human cooperation. Second, we will assess the role of learning processes in cooperative preferences by examining the emergence of these preferences across environments where cooperative norms differ. If cooperative preferences are learned from the environment, they should vary across societies from their earliest emergence. This program of research will be the first to test the impact of learning on the emergence of cooperative preferences in infancy, addressing key knowledge gaps in our understanding of the natural origins of human cooperation.