Cooperative coordination as a social behavior

Coordinating behavior is widespread in contexts that include courtship, aggression, and cooperation for shared outcomes. The social significance of cooperative coordination (CC) is usually downplayed by learning theorists, evolutionary biologists, and game theorists in favor of an individual behavior → outcome perspective predicated on maximizing payoffs for all participants. To more closely model CC as it occurs under free-ranging conditions, pairs of rats were rewarded for coordinated shuttling within a shared chamber with unrestricted social interaction. Results show that animals learned to work together with sensitivity to the task and type of partner. Moreover, social interaction and coordination influenced both consumption of the reward solution immediately following a session and preference for cooperation, suggesting that affective states and incentives related to cooperation extend beyond the outcomes obtained. These results support field studies by showing not only how cooperation is performed but also the importance of considering how the behavior of cooperating affects outcomes and preference for cooperating. This article and some of the research described here were supported in part by Grant 96-00293 from the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation to the author and Peter R. Killeen of Arizona State University. Richard Schuster (Ph.D. in Psychology, Harvard University 1968) has been a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Zambia (1971–1977), with field research on antelopes, and a Lecturer at the Department of Psychology, University of Haifa, Israel (1977-present). His main research focus is on laboratory models of social behavior.