If Humans Evolved to Cooperate, Why Is Cooperation So Hard?

Humans have a long history of cooperating together, which has helped us survive and thrive for hundreds of thousands of years in places around the world.

There is a pervasive form of zero-sum thinking that holds that we should look out for number one, and that helping others or being kind is a mug’s game where you somehow lose out by doing so. But this is completely untrue. The history of life on earth is a history of teamwork, of collective action, and of cooperation. Being part of a team is better than going it alone. Cooperation has been and still is the route to our species’s success.