Guest Editor’s Preface

As a matter of fact, people cooperate most of the time. Individuals are remarkably good at avoiding conflict and acting or working together for their mutual benefit and for the common benefit of the group to which they belong. While also other organisms, like plants or animals, do cooperate both with other members of their own species and with members of other species, only humans are systematically cooperative to such a high degree, and only human society depends so deeply on cooperation among its members for its very existence (Bowles and Gintis 2011, Nowak 2011). Confronted with the plain fact that people cooperate, scholars have faced significant difficulties in explaining why and how exactly they cooperate. The problem of cooperation has indeed turned out to be a surprisingly complex challenge for many different disciplines, including philosophy, economics, and behavioral sciences. Today, the study of cooperation is an active, highly interdisciplinary enterprise which draws upon the results of at least anthropology, evolutionary biology, psychology, sociology, political science, mathematics