Human Cooperation and the Crises of Climate Change, COVID-19, and Misinformation

Paul A. M. Van Lange; David Rand

In brief

Misinformation, climate change, and COVID-19 are each social dilemmas rooted in conflicts between individual and collective interests. Using cooperation theory from evolutionary biology and social psychology, this review frames misinformation as involving multiple nested dilemmas around effort costs in assessing accuracy and benefits from sharing falsehoods, and discusses how cooperation mechanisms like reputation and social preferences can inform solution strategies including accuracy nudges, platform interventions, and collective action.

Contributions

Reviews five core mechanisms of cooperation evolution: kinship, spatial selection, group selection, direct reciprocity, and reputation
Discusses how reputation enables two routes to cooperation: conditional cooperation (reciprocity requiring good standing) and signaling (demonstrating cooperative intent)
Examines social preferences (positive regard, parochialism, egalitarianism) underlying cooperative behavior across social scales
Frames three contemporary crises—climate change, COVID-19, and misinformation—as social dilemmas illuminated by cooperation theory
For misinformation specifically, identifies multiple embedded social dilemmas: effort costs in checking accuracy, benefits from sharing without vetting, and temptation from intentional falsehood spreading
Reviews evidence that cognitive effort (measured via Cognitive Reflection Test) predicts resistance to misinformation and that accuracy-focused interventions (primes, nudges) increase discernment
Discusses solutions including platform warnings, crowdsourced fact-checking, and collective action against media companies and politicians, while noting each creates second-order cooperation dilemmas

Method

Narrative review of empirical literature on human cooperation across psychology, evolutionary biology, economics, and political science. Focus on social dilemmas and game-theoretic models. Emphasizes recent experimental and field research on cooperation mechanisms and their application to societal challenges, with particular attention to the misinformation literature (Pennycook & Rand, 2018, 2020, 2021).

Results

Cooperation mechanisms: Kinship, spatial selection, and group selection rely on similarity assortment; direct reciprocity and reputation enable conditioning on partners' past behavior. Reputation is central to human non-kin cooperation and operates via conditional cooperation (benefit only those with good standing) and signaling (demonstrate willingness to cooperate).

Misinformation as nested social dilemmas:

Effort dilemma: People must invest cognitive effort to assess accuracy, but this is costly and unpleasant. Those who perform higher on the CRT (cognitive reflection) are less susceptible to falsehoods and more discerning in what they share.
Attention dilemma: Most falsehood sharing stems from inattention rather than intentional deception; subtle accuracy primes significantly reduce both belief and sharing of false content.
Temptation dilemma: A small fraction knowingly share false content for engagement, political alignment, or chaos; these actors face no immediate cost and reap personal benefits.
Collective action dilemma: Solutions like platform warnings, content downranking, and professional fact-checking face scalability limits. Crowdsourcing shows promise but requires unpaid user effort. Pressure on media and politicians via boycotts and voting is effective but individually costly.

Evidence for interventions:

Accuracy-focused nudges (primes emphasizing accuracy when assessing news) increase scrutiny of headlines and improve sharing decisions in field experiments on Twitter
Warning labels reduce belief and sharing, especially when warnings are timely and comprehensive
Cognitive effort is key: time pressure and cognitive load increase belief in misinformation; prompting analytical thinking decreases it

Solutions raise new dilemmas: Warning systems create an "implied truth effect" (absent warning = must be checked); crowdsourced fact-checking shifts the burden to unpaid users; platform downranking requires identifying falsehood at scale, which is hard; and political/consumer pressure against media and politicians is individually costly.

Notes

The paper's chief strength is its unified theoretical lens: framing misinformation as a cooperation problem reveals that most solutions (warnings, crowdsourcing, collective action) create their own second-order cooperation challenges, which explains why single interventions often fail. The authors are careful to distinguish genuine intentional spreaders (a small fraction) from the majority who fail to attend to accuracy—this distinction matters for intervention design.

The paper builds on two recent Annual Review of Psychology articles (Van Dijk & De Dreu on economic games; Henrich & Muthukrishna on cultural evolution) and thus sits at the boundary of classical cooperation theory and recent misinformation research. A weakness is that the paper's scope is broad: the same framework applies to climate, COVID, and misinformation, but the specifics of each crisis differ in ways the review mentions but does not deeply explore (e.g., climate requires long-term sacrifice; COVID involves high uncertainty under time pressure; misinformation involves intentional actors). Readers seeking specific policy levers may find the theory-heavy framing less actionable than papers focused on a single crisis or intervention.

The emphasis on reputation and social preferences as drivers of cooperation aligns with recent work by Pennycook and Rand on how making accuracy a social norm (rather than just a factual criterion) affects sharing behavior—a direction worth pursuing experimentally across different contexts and platforms.