phys.org: “The key to getting people to work together effectively could be giving them the flexibility to choose their collaborators and the comfort of working with established contacts, new research suggests. For starters, it’s important to recognize that cooperation between humans makes no sense, said David Melamed, an assistant professor of sociology at The Ohio State University and lead author of the study, which appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  “From an evolutionary perspective, cooperation shouldn’t exist between people – you always do better by not cooperating because then people can’t rip you off or take advantage of you,” Melamed said. “Especially in a one-time interaction, it’s essentially paying a cost for someone else to benefit, and researchers have been working for a long time to understand why people evolved to work together.” In this study, Melamed and his co-authors aimed to uncover what conditions led people to collaborate most willingly…”