Experimental Studies on Human Cooperation and Its Application to Organizational Management

Abstract

In social psychology and its related areas, empirical studies using experimental games have been conducted to investigate the mechanisms of human cooperation. This paper overviews representative empirical studies using experimental games and introduces the role of “reciprocity,” which has been known as an important foundation of human cooperation. In addition, the paper introduces the effect of sanction on maintaining a large-scale human cooperative society and discusses possibilities that evidence of empirical studies on human cooperation could be applied to organizational management.