Risk-averse people make cooperation more likely, especially in highly connected groups

This paper finds that when people are risk-averse, it makes cooperation more likely to happen and last. This is especially true for people who are highly connected in a social network.

Most models of cooperation assume people always know the outcome of their actions. But in the real world, outcomes are uncertain, and people react to that uncertainty differently. This paper shows that how people feel about risk can fundamentally change whether cooperation takes hold, even reversing previous assumptions about how social structures affect group behavior.