Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Heritability of cooperative behavior in the trust game

2008; National Academy of Sciences; Volume: 105; Issue: 10 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1073/pnas.0710069105

1091-6490

David Cesarini, Christopher T. Dawes, James H. Fowler, Magnus Johannesson, Paul Lichtenstein, Björn Wallace,

Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior

Although laboratory experiments document cooperative behavior in humans, little is known about the extent to which individual differences in cooperativeness result from genetic and environmental variation. In this article, we report the results of two independently conceived and executed studies of monozygotic and dizygotic twins, one in Sweden and one in the United States. The results from these studies suggest that humans are endowed with genetic variation that influences the decision to invest, and to reciprocate investment, in the classic trust game. Based on these findings, we urge social scientists to take seriously the idea that differences in peer and parental socialization are not the only forces that influence variation in cooperative behavior.