Early to rise - healthy, wealthy, wise, yada yada. Actually, it seems ever clearer that there's a base cause for this and many other constructive behaviors - good brains.

The authors tested ... with Raven's Progressive Matrices, a real IQ test. They then put pairs ... through a repeated prisoner's dilemma game, and found:

[M]easures of cognitive skill [CS] predict social awareness and choices in a sequential Prisoner's Dilemma game. Subjects with higher CS's more accurately forecast others' behavior....[S]ubjects with higher CS's also cooperate more as first movers.

This set of genuine experiments improves on this older paper, which found that students at high-SAT schools cooperated more in repeated prisoner's dilemmas than students at low-SAT schools. Now we know it's not just because posh, high-SAT schools facilitate a "culture of cooperation" or something like that. Smart individuals just figure it out on their own.....

It isn't about playing nice or any other sort of socialization, it's about smart choices. I think that it's important to grasp this since the smart choice in some future situation may not be nice, at least as opponents and other assorted road kill might think, if they can still think. I also think that we do ourselves harm by failing to make this clear during training. The reason to cooperate, much of the time and almost always as a default initial appraoch, is that this is how to achieve good individual outcomes. It's how to prosper, or win or whatever.

I read somewhere that about 1% of the population are sociopaths, people who have no conscience, so to speak. They are unaffected by the distress and pain of others. I suspect that this is one pole of a continuum and that a much larger percentage of people have less than average concern for harms caused to others. They don't really understand all the fuss about nice. I bet that even these people can understand the evidence that cooperative behavior is winning behavior, even if they don't give a hoot about nice. The smart ones figure that out on their own, and the dumb ones could learn from them.