The emergence of cooperative behaviors, norms, and strategies across five diverse societies

Human cooperation involves a complex web of interconnected behaviors that develop across the lifespan in conjunction with the cultural environment. While we have learned much in recent decades about the early origins of these behaviors in Western societies, we still know relatively little about: (1) how cooperative behaviors vary across cultures, (2) how the normative environment shapes the development of different cooperative behaviors, and (3) the extent to which key cooperative behaviors relate to one another. In this investigation, we examined the development of a suite of four cooperative behaviors — those related to fairness, trustworthiness, forgiveness, and honesty — in children (N=413, 5-13 years old) from five diverse societies: urban-living children in the United States, rural-living children in Uganda, Canada, and Peru, and hunter-horticulturalist Shuar children in Amazonian Ecuador. In addition to behavioral data, we collected normative judgments from peers (N=163) and adults (N=86) in each community to culturally contextualize behavior within the larger normative environment. Examined together, we find compelling evidence for substantial cross-cultural variation in cooperative behaviors and norms among children, but that, more generally, both children’s behaviors and norms tend to converge toward community-specific norms in middle childhood. We also find three distinct cooperative strategies — Maximization, Generic Cooperation, Partner-Contingent Cooperation — show that these strategies change in prevalence across development, and find that the prevalence of each strategy varies across societies. This investigation advances our understanding of human cooperation by demonstrating how a constellation of cooperative behaviors develops across diverse societies and highlighting the underlying cultural forces that contribute to its development.