Bailey House: University of California, Los Angeles

One explanation for the diversity in cooperative behavior across human social groups is that our prosociality is motivated in part by learned cultural beliefs that vary substantially across societies, and which extend adaptations for cooperation between genetic kin and reciprocal partners. Reframing this idea as a developmental question about how culture shapes the emergence of cooperative behavior throughout human ontogeny, in this talk I present a series of cross-cultural studies that take a first step towards understanding how population differences in cooperation emerge across human development. In these studies of prosocial behavior, I explore the origins of population differences among children aged 3-14 years in a number of diverse societies. The results of this work suggest that human prosociality unfolds through a complex interaction between developmental stages, population membership, and the personal cost of helping. These results are consistent with models of human cooperation based on evolved cultural beliefs, but they also point to critical questions that must be addressed in future work.