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Familiarity breeds cooperation

Nature volume 394, pages 121–122 (1998)Cite this article

Many theoretical models have been developed to study the conditions under which unrelated individuals should cooperate or not cooperate. But such behaviour is rarely ‘all or nothing’, and new mathematical models allow the optimal level of cooperation to be determined.

Acts of giving, receiving and repaying permeate various aspects of human life and, similarly, the lives of many animals. However, evolutionary theory predicts that reciprocally altruistic cooperation should be rare in the animal kingdom — natural selection should tend to favour selfish, uncooperative behaviour. So what are the special conditions required for reciprocal altruism to occur? And what is the optimal level of altruism that each partner should show? New mathematical models reported by Roberts and Sherratt1 on page 175of this issue show that cooperation can spread more readily than previously thought. Moreover, cooperation should increase over the history of a partnership when organisms repeatedly interact, and when they can flexibly respond in a continuous manner to the level of cooperation that was previously shown by their partners.

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Figure 1: You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours — grooming by Barbary macaques on Gibraltar.

R. D. MARTIN, AIM, ZURICH

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. the Department of Zoology and Animal Ecology, Bâtiment de Biologie, University of Lausanne, 1015, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Laurent Keller

  2. the Section of Neurobiology and Behavior, Seeley G. Mudd Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, 14853, New York, USA

    H. Kern Reeve

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  1. Laurent Keller
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  2. H. Kern Reeve
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Keller, L., Reeve, H. Familiarity breeds cooperation. Nature 394, 121–122 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/28031

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