Cooperation

This chapter explores how human cooperation is influenced by uniquely human mental skills and how it can increase the ability to discover and execute productive behavioral sequences. It argues that human-level cooperation requires a sophisticated understanding of social relations or a mental map of the individual's social world. It also discusses differences between human and animal cooperation, noting how human cooperation surpasses that of other species in its flexibility, diversity, sequence length, and outcomes. The chapter highlights the benefits of cooperation that can be understood in terms of sequences, such as group having more behavioral skills than its individual members and are able to explore a larger number of sequences. It mentions the division of labor, which reduces combinatorial dilemmas by enabling individuals to work on the tasks they know best.