More empathy, more cooperation

As the researchers turned up the amount of empathy (on the horizontal axis) in their modeled societies, cooperation rates (on the vertical axis) tended to climb, whichever rules they told individuals to use to assign good or bad reputations. Only the social norm known as "Scoring" wasn't affected by growing empathy in the society.

Chart: The Conversation, CC-BY-ND Source: Radzvilavicius, eLife 2019 Get the data