Empathy and cooperation go hand in hand
In a new analysis, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania investigate cooperation with an evolutionary approach. Using game-theory-driven models, they show that a capacity for empathy fosters cooperation, according to senior author Joshua Plotkin, an evolutionary biologist. The models also show that the extent to which empathy promotes cooperation depends on a given society’s system for moral evaluation.
“Having not just the capacity but the willingness to take into account someone else’s perspective when forming moral judgments tends to promote cooperation,” says Plotkin.
What’s more, the group’s analysis points to a heartening conclusion. All else being equal, empathy tends to spread throughout a population under most scenarios.
“We asked, ‘can empathy evolve?'” explains Arunas Radzvilavicius, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral researcher who works with Plotkin. “What if individuals start copying the empathetic way of observing each other’s interactions? And we saw that empathy soared through the population.”
Plotkin and Radzvilavicius coauthored the study, published today in eLife, with Alexander Stewart, an assistant professor at the University of Houston.