Cognitive Ability and Cooperation: Evidence from the Public Goods Experiments

The most important unanswered question in evolutionary biology, and more generally in the social sciences, is how cooperative behavior evolved. What it takes to bring out our cooperative spirit is a scientific puzzle that is driving basic scientific research and shaping the future of science. By using the public goods game model, we designed four types of experiments, namely, non-punishment (NP), free punishment (FP), cost punishment (CP), and external punishment (EP) experiment, to test the hypothesis that people with higher cognitive abilities have internalized a higher tendency of cooperation. We found that people with higher cognitive abilities are more willing to sacrifice private gain for the public good in FP, CP, and EP experiment; They also imposed more "pro-social punishment" (spending time and energy to punish unfair actions, even though there's nothing to be gained by these actions for themselves), and less "antisocial punishment" (punishing the high contributors as much as they punished the low contributors).