Max Schaub with Bocconi University in Italy has conducted a study to test theories of cooperation among individuals in groups. In his paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, he describes the study, the data he collected, and his interpretation of the results.

As Schaub notes, historians and social scientists alike have worked under certain assumptions regarding social behavior such as the idea that people in a group will band together for common protection when threatened by an outside force. But, he also notes, very little research has been done to see if such seemingly logical assumptions are actually true. For that reason, he designed and carried out a study that involved people living in small communities in the country of Georgia in the Caucasus. People there live in small rural communities and are a mix of ethnic Georgians and Azerbaijanis—two groups with a historically shaky relationship.

To test social theories, Schaub asked people from both groups to participate in games designed to bring out feelings of trust in a way that could be measured. In one such game, called "the public goods game," two players contribute to a common pool of resources (Georgian money). During some runs of the game, players were from the same group; in others, they were not. Trust could be measured by how much a player was willing to place in the pot. Another, called the "threat game," involved asking players who had won money in the first game to use it to play a game in which they were paired with someone from their own group in some rounds and with a player from the other group in others—in some cases, they were told which group their partner was from, and in other cases they were not. In any case, a designated player was allowed to take some money from his or her partner to use in playing some versions of the game or the partner was allowed to invest it for protection of their group.

After running the game with multiple players in multiple villages with varying degrees of hostility between groups, Schaub found that true to form, players did tend to band together when threatened by an outsider. But, he notes, he also found an unexpected degree of cooperation between individuals of opposite groups—a possible move, he suggests, by those who live in the villages to keep the peace.

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