People adopt different social behavior depending on the context they’re in. A deeply generous friend may be a cutthroat colleague, for example. Using a game theory framework, researchers find that context-dependent behavior doesn’t stop cooperation from flourishing, especially when behavioral strategies can ‘spillover’ between social settings.

It’s a widespread feature of human society: People can adopt different behaviors depending on the social context they’re in. Yet according to a new study by Penn biologists out today in Science Advances, that context-dependent behavior tends to promote the spread of cooperative behavior across a whole society.

Using models rooted in game theory, the researchers show that cooperation is particularly favored when there is room for «spillover» between domains. In other words, a worker can observe how their colleague behaves with her friends when deciding how to interact with that person and others in the workplace.

«We studied groups both small and large,» says Joshua Plotkin, a professor in Penn’s Department of Biology and senior author on the new paper, «and we find that the simple idea of conditioning behavior on the social context, while allowing imitation of behaviors across different contexts — that alone facilitates cooperation in all domains simultaneously.»

That work, along with a related study in Nature Human Behaviour, suggests that the greater the number of domains of social life, the higher the likelihood that cooperative interactions will eventually dominate.

«This shows that the structure of interactions in different aspects of our social lives can galvanize each other — for the benefit of mutual cooperation,» Plotkin says.

Story Source: Materials provided by University of Pennsylvania. Original written by Katherine Unger Baillie. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.