Human cooperation: A multimodal approach

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Christoph Korn
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology ; Biological Psychiatry ; Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience
• Term: since 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 392443797

Humans excel in cooperating with each other. Working together can lead to immense achievements and prosperity. But cooperation is unstable: Each individual faces the temptation to defect and reap the benefits of cooperation without paying its costs. Game theoretic analyses have thus shown that cooperation is often irrational. The overarching goal of this proposal is to specify the behavioral and neural processes that allow humans to cooperate in a competitive world. Understanding cooperation requires a multimodal approach: Mathematical frameworks identify a priori rational benchmarks, formal models describe empirically overserved behavior, and advanced neuroimaging and psychophysiological methods characterize neural mechanisms. Understanding cooperation between two individuals necessitates investigating three interrelated processes: How do humans learn about the traits of other persons prior to cooperation? How do humans establish and maintain cooperation when they are uncertain about what the other person can do or when they encounter coordination difficulties? How do humans share joint outcomes once cooperation is firmly established? I propose three projects to identify specific variants of reinforcement learning and decision-making models that can explain these processes. Central assumption are that humans use their own personality as a heuristic during learning and that they base decisions to cooperate on restricted computations of possible outcomes due to their limited cognitive abilities. The medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) is expected to be a key player for the computations that underlie cooperation. In particular, the three projects test for the involvement of the MPFC in prediction error computations during social learning, in making recursive inferences about another person’s intention during cooperation, and in simulating others’ values when allocating outcomes. In clinical studies within this proposal I aim to elucidate why patients with borderline personality disorder fail to establish and maintain cooperation and why they forgo opportunities for mutually beneficial interactions.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Dr. Sabine C. Herpertz