Summary: A new research challenges the belief that larger organizations reduce assistance, showing otherwise that accommodating interpersonal relationships enhance cooperation. Experts found that in a convict’s problem game, participants in bigger groups cooperated more often, despite storage limitations.
Brain scans revealed that participants relied on altruistic instincts to guide behavior when memories of previous interactions were fuzzy. Important mental regions, including the frontal lobe and nucleus accumbens, helped stabilize storage, reward, and decision-making.
Important Facts:
- Larger Groups, More Cooperation: Members cooperated more often in teams of up to six.
- Storage and Social Behavior: When prior interactions were vague, individuals defaulted to cooperation.
- Mental Regions Involved: The cerebral cortex and nucleus accumbens guided trust-based choices.
Origin: RIKEN
You bigger groups develop stronger cooperation?
The RIKEN Center for Brain Science ( CBS ), which published new research in the journal Communications Psychology on December 23, challenges conventional wisdom that larger groups ‘ sizes reduce cooperation by showing that fluid connections and innate prosocial instincts enable people to thrive in larger social circles.
Humans are naturally social animals, and they rely heavily on collaboration to achieve. This capacity for collaboration is firmly rooted in how our neurons function. Importantly, the size of an individual’s brain often correlates with the size of its cultural groups.
Humans, with our relatively big brains, you form larger and more complex parties than you other species. Usually, however, scientists believed that as teams grow in size, assistance becomes more challenging.
In big groups, losing one link may not seem major, and interacting with everyone properly to build trust becomes difficult. This was confirmed by earlier experiments, which suggested that participation tends to decline in larger groups.
This presumption has been disproven by a recent review by Rei Akaishi of RIKEN CBS, which demonstrates that larger organizations can really encourage greater cooperation. The “prisoner’s problem” game, in which players alternate between cooperating for joint benefit or acting unjustly, was a study of 83 participants.
Participants were permitted to leave parties they found unwanted or remove obstinate members, and class sizes ranged from two to six people. Throughout the match, functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to track player mental activity.
The results were surprising: people in larger organizations cooperated more often, with 57 % of all selections being joint.
As the size of the group increased, the willingness to co-operate increased. Although party size itself did not directly encourage joint behavior, it had an impact on how people managed their memory and made decisions when social interactions took place. They frequently gave in to interpersonal behaviors, relying on their common inclinations to believe or cooperate, even when they had trouble recalling previous interactions.
This suggests that when remembrance becomes vague, people prioritize cooperation over prudence, enabling better group dynamics.
Brain scans offered further insights into the decision-making process. Specific brain regions, such as the fusiform gyrus and precuneus, processed memories of past interactions, while the nucleus accumbens connected these memories to feelings of reward.
When deciding whether to cooperate with someone who might have previously betrayed them, the prefrontal cortex had a significant role in balancing these memories against personal tendencies.
When memories were less reliable, the brain appeared to naturally encourage cooperation, perhaps as a way to maintain group harmony.
These findings provide a fresh perspective on how people develop trust and social interaction within groups. Rather than relying solely on stable, long-term relationships. The study emphasizes the advantages of developing cooperative relationships through flexible and fluid social connections.
This insight is particularly relevant in today’s world, where digital platforms and online communities thrive on dynamic, ever-evolving relationships.
” In practical terms, our findings could help improve teamwork in schools, workplaces, and online environments”, says Akaishi.
Allowing people to freely form and adjust connections, rather than adhering to rigid group structures, could lead to better collaboration. For organizations, embracing this natural flexibility in system design may enhance overall group dynamics.
Additionally, the study provides insight into how people developed into cooperative societies. By leveraging memory and adaptability, humans have developed the capacity to work together effectively, even under uncertain circumstances.
” We plan to further explore these findings in real-world settings, such as schools or companies, to better understand how factors like culture, leadership, and individual personalities influence group behavior”, says Akaishi.
Our work aims to offer practical methods for building more harmonious and productive communities.
About this news about social neuroscience research
Author: Masataka Sasabe
Source: RIKEN
Contact: Masataka Sasabe – RIKEN
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
Rei Akaishi and colleagues'” A Neurocognitive Mechanism for Greater Group Formation Cooperation.” Communications Psychology
Abstract
A Neurocognitive Mechanism for Greater Group Formation Cooperation
How do changes in group size affect how well groups cooperate?
To examine this question, we performed a dynamic, network-based prisoner’s dilemma experiment with fMRI.
Across 83 human participants, we observed increased cooperation as group size increased. However, our computational modeling analysis of behavior and fMRI revealed that group size alone did not increase cooperation.
Instead, the interaction between the group size-modulated increase in cooperation is caused by the shift in the group’s prosocial tendency toward higher memory demands in larger groups, and between the participants ‘ stable prosocial tendencies and the dynamic reciprocal strategy weighed by memory confidence.
We discovered that the fusiform gyrus and precuneus encoded memory confidence, while the left DLPFC and dACC revealed that this integration was reflected in prosocial tendencies.
Therefore, emergent cooperation in more naturalistic and dynamic group formation is a fundamental pillar of interaction between recall uncertainty during reciprocal interaction ( i .e., forgetting ) and one’s individual prosocial preference.
