We use large-scale survey data of German speaking villages from the 1930's to investigate drivers of cooperation, gender, and religious norms. Through geographic cluster analysis, we show that inter-regional variation explains only little heterogeneity in norms. Villages in the same physical and...

In today's highly complex economic environment, cooperation among individuals is crucial for organizational and societal success. Most of the situations in which cooperation is required involve costly efforts whose consequences play out over time. Here, we provide a systematic and comprehensive...

Understanding the roots of human cooperation among strangers is of great importance for solving pressing social dilemmas and maintening public goods in human societies. We study the development of cooperation in 929 young children, aged 3 to 6. In a unified experimental framework, we examine...

In this paper, we investigate the joint influence of empirical and normative expectations on cooperative behavior. We conduct two experimental studies (n = 243) in which we separately elicit (i) behavior in a public goods game and (ii) social norms under the form of normative and empirical...

Social science research has stressed the important role of religion in sustaining cooperation among non-kin. We contribute to this literature with a large-scale empirical study documenting the relationship between religion and cooperation. We analyze newly available, experimentally validated,...

Descriptive norms - the behavior of other individuals in one's reference group - play a key role in shaping individual decisions. When characterizing the behavior of others, a standard approach in the literature is to focus on average behavior. In this paper, we argue both theoretically and...