Cooperation in the brain: neuroscientific contributions to theory and policy

• Neuroscience has begun to provide key insights into the mechanisms of cooperation.
• These insights help to understand the psychology of cooperative decision-making.
• This way, neuroscience can contribute to the development of policy interventions.

An intriguing feature of human social interaction is the degree to which we are willing to cooperate with others, even when this cooperation is risky and can make us vulnerable. Recent advances in neuroscientific research have begun to provide additional insights into the neural mechanisms of cooperation that can help to better understand the psychological processes that underlie cooperative behavior. In turn, these models of cooperative decision-making can play a valuable role in informing and developing policy interventions aimed at improving societal level cooperation. Here, we outline several lines of current research that are proving useful in understanding the nature of cooperative decision-making, and outline how these research themes can provide promising insights for the development of more effective policy campaigns.