The association between primary psychopathic traits and non-cooperative behaviors is well-identified. There is a lack of studies on how to motivate cooperative behaviors in individuals with primary psychopathic traits. This study investigated the effects of monetary incentives and social incentives on promoting cooperation in healthy adults with varying primary psychopathic traits. Participants played a one-shot public goods game (PGG) with other anonymous players in three different contexts: a social incentives context where participants' decisions would be judged by others, a monetary incentives context where participants' decisions would result in winning or losing money depending on their contributions, and a control condition where no additional incentives were implemented. We found that, compared to the control condition, both monetary and social incentives significantly improved participants' contributions to the public project-an indicator of cooperative behavior. However, the association between higher primary psychopathic traits and less cooperation was only observed in the context of social incentives. Computational modeling further revealed that this effect can be explained by the diminishing guilt aversion when participants deliberately violated their inferred expectations of themselves from others' perspectives. This study found that social incentives can encourage cooperative behaviors in non-clinical psychopathy, and identified the mental processes navigating this effect.

Bullying events during adolescence are common, yet it remains largely unclear which kinds of behavioral patterns are more likely to result in being exploited. Leveraging recent advances in computational modeling and experimental economics, this study examines whether being nice or tough during early social interactions will impact future interactions. Adolescents were randomly assigned to play a cooperation game with two different simulated partners. We found that participants were more likely to cooperate with the initially tough partner than with the initially nice partner. Computational modeling revealed that behavioral changes were driven by changes in perceived social rewards from reciprocity. Perceived social rewards mediated the effects of different partners on the participants cooperative behaviors. The results indicate that being nice is not a good strategy for building social cooperation, and advance our knowledge of how adolescents form sustained social relationships with peers and may have implications for the education field.

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We live in a world where change and uncertainty are ubiquitous. Numerous studies have found environmental changes have a profound influence on human perception and probabilistic reward learning. This study examined how social environmental changes affect human cooperation learning and the possible latent cognitive computations. Two independent studies tested two dimensions regarding environmental changes, i.e., volatility and probability. Combining advanced modeling and experimental economics, Study 1 showed opponent’s stable, compared with the volatile, response significantly increased participants’ cooperation decision. Model-based analysis showed this effect can be explained by the increasing learning precision (i.e., smaller prediction errors in estimating the opponent’s decision) and subjective social reward of reciprocity. This effect is stronger in the social context where the opponent is believed a human than in the non-social context where the opponent is believed a computer. Study 2 (a pre-registered study) further investigated this effect by independently manipulating the volatility and probability of the opponent’s cooperation behaviors, which cannot be dissociated in Study 1. Study 2 showed the observed effects from Study 1 are accounted by the variations of opponent’s cooperation probability but not of volatility. Opponent’s high, compared with low, cooperation probability significantly increases participants’ learning precision and subjective social reward from reciprocity, thus further promoting participants’ cooperation decision making. These effects are more statistically significant in the social context than in the non-social context. These findings reveal a social-prominent effect on human cooperation learning and the cognitive computations account for that effect.