Why Humans Cooperate

Cooperation among humans is one of the keys to our great evolutionary success. Natalie and Joseph Henrich examine this phenomena with a unique fusion of theoretical work on the evolution of cooperation ethnographic descriptions of social behavior and a range of other experimental results. Their experimental and ethnographic data come from a small insular group of middle-class Iraqi Christians called Chaldeans living in metro Detroit whom the Henrichs use as an example to show how kinship relations ethnicity and culturally transmitted traditions provide the key to explaining the evolution of cooperation over multiple generations.