Spontaneous Giving Feb12

Spontaneous Giving and Calculated Greed: Intuitive Cooperation in Social Dilemmas
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
1:00 - 2:30 PM EST
MIT Building E62-350, 100 Main Street, Cambridge
David Rand
Cooperation is central to human social behavior. Choosing to cooperate, however, requires individuals to incur a personal cost to benefit others. Why, then, are people often willing to cooperate, and how can the fundamentally selfish process of natural selection favor ?altruistic? cooperation? In this talk I explore the cognitive basis of cooperative decision-making in humans using a dual process framework: Are people predisposed toward selfishness, behaving
cooperatively only through active self-control? Or are we intuitively cooperative, with reflection and prospective reasoning favoring ?rational? self-interest? I will present data from  economic game experiments to investigate this issue, including both correlation and manipulation studies and using both college undergraduates and the more diverse subject pool offered by Amazon Mechanical Turk. The results provide convergent evidence that intuition supportscooperation in social dilemmas, while reflection can undermine these cooperative impulses.
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Bio:  David Rand studies cooperation, generosity and altruism, combining approaches from a number of disciplines including psychology, economics and evolutionary biology. His work integrates empirical observations from behavioral experiments with predictions generated by evolutionary game theoretic math models and computer simulations. Rand is currently a research scientist at Harvard University, and moves to Yale in July to begin an assistant professorship in the department of Psychology. He has been named to Wired magazine?s Smart List 2012 of ?50 people who will change the world? as well as being chosen as a PopTech 2012 Science Fellow, and his work has been featured on the front covers of both Nature and Science and reported widely in the media. Rand seeks answers to why people are willing to help others at a cost to themselves, and what can be done to help solve social dilemmas when they arise.