Pharmacological Aspects of Social Cooperation

Abstract

At first impression, it may seem paradoxical that a paper on cooperation would be included in a symposium devoted to aggression. Aggression and cooperation are usually depicted as contrasting and unrelated phenomena. Aggression is typically applied to an inherently selfish interaction, whereby one individual gains at the expense of another who loses by virtue of injury, expulsion, or reduced access to a desired resource. In cooperation, the social interaction is usually characterized as positive, involving a joint or collaborative action directed towards obtaining a desired goal for one or both (Hake and Vukelich 1972; Nisbet 1968). This dichotomous approach is supported by a tendency in laboratory research to study aggression or cooperation in isolation from one another. Aggression has been by far the more popular subject. The few studies on cooperation have been aimed at demonstrating whether animals are capable of behaviour meeting the criteria of cooperation. Thus, rats learned to coordinate an exchange of places for feeding without obtaining shock (Daniel 1942), chimpanzees learned a series of food discrimination tasks (Crawford 1941), rhesus monkeys learned to avoid shock by attending to social cues of fear (Miller et al. 1962), and pigeons learned to peck on corresponding keys in near simultaneity (Skinner 1953).