Social scripts as drivers of primate cooperation

Abstract

Humans have a reputation for being ‘hyper-cooperative’, as they occasionally behave altruistically when they should not, for instance when helping strangers with no prospect of reciprocity or reputational benefits. Although intriguing, human behaviour is also accountable to evolutionary theory, which predicts that altruism is only adaptive if it benefits close genetic relatives. One way to explain maladaptive helping is that humans and primates experience reality to various degrees as part of social scripts - mental representations of how social events normally unfold. As a consequence, decisions about helping are no longer about kinship but about anticipating the cooperation enforcement strategies of others, particularly negative reciprocity. Social scripts thus extract altruism from the evolutionary confines of kin-biased helping to enable non-kin cooperation with all its partner-control mechanisms. A review of the primate literature suggests that social script theory may explain the often inconsistent results in great ape prosociality experiments as well as puzzling findings of altruism towards non-relatives in the wild. Cognition may enable humans and some animals to behave altruistically towards non-relatives because social scripts make them perceive the need of others as a cooperation problem.