Manipulating attention facilitates cooperation

Cooperation is essential for human societies, but not all individuals cooperate to the same degree. This is typically attributed to individual motives - for example, to be prosocial or to avoid risks. Here, we investigate whether cooperative behavior can, in addition, reflect what people pay attention to and whether cooperation may therefore be influenced by manipulations that direct attention. We first analyze the attentional patterns of participants playing one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma games and find that choices indeed relate systematically to attention to specific social outcomes, as well as to individual eye movement patterns reflecting attentional strategies. To test for the causal impact of attention independently of participants’ prosocial and risk attitudes, we manipulate the task display and find that cooperation is enhanced when displays facilitate attention to others’ outcomes. Machine learning classifiers trained on these attentional patterns confirm that attentional strategies measured using eye-tracking can accurately predict cooperation out-of-sample. Our findings demonstrate that theories of cooperation can benefit from incorporating attention and that attentional interventions can improve cooperative outcomes.