Genes, Games, and Political Participation

Groups often ask their members to contribute to collective activities. But the benefits of these activities often do not offset the costs of individual participation. Everyone in the group may be better off if everyone cooperates, but each person individually may be better off not cooperating. As a result, we might expect cooperation to fail. Yet modern human society relies on cooperation at a level unseen anywhere else in the animal world (e.g. Stevens and Hauser 2004). We have organized complex systems of government and social assistance, and we regularly join together in smaller acts of cooperation, whether in community groups, sports teams, or explicitly political organizations. We almost constantly engage in commercial activities that require trust in complete strangers (Henrich et al. 2001). All of this adds up to societies that are unrivalled in size and peacefulness (Pinker 2007). But how did we come to cooperate on such a massive scale? Or at all?