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What is Cooperation?

Cooperation can be understood in more than one way. In this project, it is useful to begin with a broad definition, then subdivide that broad category, and finally distinguish between cases where cooperation is necessary and cases where it is voluntary.

Broad meaning of cooperation​

In a broad sense, cooperation is not limited to explicit teamwork or joint action toward a shared goal.

Definition​

Broad cooperation is socially responsive behavior in which one actor's behavior is compatible with, accommodating to, enabling of, or supportive of another actor's behavior, goals, welfare, or orderly coexistence, rather than obstructing, defeating, or opposing it.

Under this broad meaning, cooperation includes not only direct helping, but also many low-level and routine forms of social accommodation.

Subdividing broad cooperation​

Broad cooperation can be subdivided into four main forms. These are not rigidly separate boxes, but they help clarify the range of phenomena included under the broad definition.

1. Mutual accommodation​

This is the most minimal form of cooperation. People adjust to one another so that interaction can proceed smoothly rather than break down.

Examples:

  • yielding space
  • turn-taking
  • letting someone merge in traffic
  • adjusting one's walking path to avoid collision
  • waiting one's turn in a queue

2. Active support​

Here one person does something that directly helps another person act, function, cope, or succeed.

Examples:

  • helping someone carry something
  • giving directions
  • teaching
  • caregiving
  • explaining a procedure

3. Shared coordination​

Here people align their behavior in a more organized way around a joint activity, task, or outcome.

Examples:

  • teamwork
  • division of labor
  • collaborative problem-solving
  • jointly moving a heavy object
  • coordinating roles in a group project

4. Norm-sustaining cooperation​

This consists of behavior that supports orderly coexistence even when no one is directly helping with a specific task.

Examples:

  • politeness
  • routine civility
  • respecting turn-taking rules
  • following norms that make interaction predictable
  • low-level mutual adjustment in everyday public life

Broad cooperation can include:​

  • helping
  • sharing
  • caregiving
  • teaching
  • turn-taking
  • politeness
  • yielding space
  • tacit coordination
  • routine civility
  • norm-following that makes coexistence smoother
  • low-level mutual adjustment in everyday interaction

These examples can therefore be grouped roughly as follows:

  • Mutual accommodation: yielding space, turn-taking, tacit path adjustment
  • Active support: helping, teaching, caregiving, sharing
  • Shared coordination: tacit coordination, division of labor, joint activity
  • Norm-sustaining cooperation: politeness, routine civility, norm-following

Broad cooperation does not require:​

  • an explicit shared goal
  • equal contribution
  • altruistic motives
  • emotional warmth
  • formal agreement
  • conscious awareness that one is "cooperating"

Core features of broad cooperation​

Broad cooperation usually has one or more of the following properties:

  1. Behavioral compatibility
    The actions of different people fit together rather than interfere.

  2. Mutual accommodation
    One person adjusts to another in a way that helps interaction proceed.

  3. Facilitation
    One person's behavior makes it easier for another to act or function.

  4. Support of social order
    The behavior helps maintain civility, coordination, predictability, or orderly coexistence.

  5. Non-opposition
    The interaction is not primarily organized around defeating, resisting, or harming the other.

Examples of broad cooperation​

  • giving directions to a tourist
  • holding a door open
  • letting someone merge in traffic
  • taking turns in conversation
  • greeting politely
  • standing aside so another person can pass
  • two strangers adjusting their walking paths to avoid collision
  • a parent helping a child put on shoes
  • a colleague explaining a procedure
  • a queue functioning smoothly because people respect turn-taking

Cooperation as necessary or voluntary​

This is best treated as a separate dimension rather than as a subdivision of broad cooperation. Any of the forms above can be more necessary or more voluntary depending on the situation.

  • Necessary cooperation: One cannot realistically achieve the outcome alone, or cannot achieve it at all. Sexual reproduction is a simple example: cooperation is a necessary condition.
  • Voluntary cooperation: One can act alone, but acting together is more efficient, more reliable, or more beneficial. Division of labor is the clearest example.
  • There is also a continuum between these poles. Some outcomes are impossible alone, some are merely difficult alone, and some are possible alone but much less efficient without cooperation.

Examples:

  • making children is impossible alone
  • hunting very large prey may be possible alone only with very low probability
  • making a pin is possible alone, but far less efficient than in a cooperative division of labor

So broad cooperation can be subdivided by behavioral form while also being analyzed by degree of necessity.

Other useful dimensions of cooperation​

Broad cooperation can also be analyzed along several other dimensions. These do not replace the four-part subdivision above, but help describe important differences within each type.

1. Tacit versus explicit cooperation​

Some cooperation occurs without planning or communication, while other cooperation is deliberate and openly organized.

Examples:

  • tacit path adjustment in a crowd
  • spontaneous turn-taking in conversation
  • an explicitly organized team task
  • a planned hunting strategy

2. Dyadic versus group-level cooperation​

Some cooperation takes place between two actors, while other cooperation involves small groups, large groups, or whole institutions.

Examples:

  • one person helping another
  • two people carrying an object together
  • a work team coordinating roles
  • a society sustaining public order through norms and institutions

3. Symmetrical versus asymmetrical cooperation​

In some cases the parties contribute in roughly similar ways. In others, the relation is unequal in role, power, skill, or dependence.

Examples:

  • peers collaborating on the same task
  • friends taking turns helping one another
  • a parent caring for a child
  • a teacher guiding a student

4. Spontaneous versus enforced cooperation​

Some cooperation emerges without external enforcement, while other cooperation is stabilized by norms, sanctions, or institutional pressure.

Examples:

  • voluntary helping
  • routine civility in informal settings
  • queueing maintained by social pressure
  • rule-following sustained by formal enforcement

5. One-off versus repeated cooperation​

Some cooperative acts are isolated events, while others are repeated and may become stable patterns over time.

Examples:

  • holding a door open once
  • helping a stranger with directions
  • repeated turn-taking in ongoing interaction
  • long-run cooperation within a family, firm, or community

These dimensions can be combined. For example, cooperation may be tacit, repeated, group-level, and necessary all at once.

Provisional empirical time division of cooperation​

The four-part subdivision above is conceptual. There is no major time-use dataset that already classifies human time directly into mutual accommodation, active support, shared coordination, and norm-sustaining cooperation. Any empirical estimate therefore has to be an inference from broader time-use and social-interaction data rather than a direct measurement.

For modern adult populations in OECD-like time-use-survey settings, a plausible relative division of cooperative time is:

Display 1: Time division of the four broad forms of cooperation
Display 1: Time division of the four broad forms of cooperation.

These percentages are best read as shares of cooperative time, not shares of the entire day. In other words, if one looks only at the time people spend in behavior that can reasonably be classified as cooperative, the largest portion likely falls under shared coordination, followed by norm-sustaining cooperation, with mutual accommodation and active support each occupying smaller but still substantial shares.

Why shared coordination is estimated as the largest share​

The strongest empirical reason for assigning the largest share to shared coordination is that a large part of ordinary adult life is organized around coordinated activity: paid work, household production, schooling, childcare routines, and organized group tasks.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey 2024 Table 2, adults averaged:

  • 4.37 weekday hours and 1.22 weekend hours in working and work-related activities
  • 1.87 weekday hours and 2.35 weekend hours in household activities

Not all of this time is cooperative, but a substantial portion of it is structured through role coordination, joint production, shared routines, and interdependence. That makes shared coordination the most defensible largest category.

Why active support is substantial but smaller​

Active support includes helping, teaching, caregiving, and direct assistance. Time-use data do capture part of this category more directly than they capture some of the others.

In the same 2024 BLS table, adults averaged:

  • 0.54 weekday hours and 0.44 weekend hours caring for and helping household members
  • 0.15 weekday hours and 0.21 weekend hours caring for and helping nonhousehold members

This category becomes much larger in some life stages. In BLS data for households with young children in 2024, adults living with a child under age 6 averaged 2.57 hours per day caring for and helping household members. So 15% is best understood as a population-level average, not as a universal constant across households or life stages.

Why mutual accommodation and norm-sustaining cooperation are harder to observe directly​

Mutual accommodation and norm-sustaining cooperation are likely undercounted in standard time-use surveys because they are often embedded inside other activities rather than recorded as separate primary activities.

Examples include:

  • yielding space while walking
  • turn-taking in conversation
  • queueing properly
  • routine civility
  • low-level adherence to norms that keep interaction predictable

These behaviors often occur during work, commuting, eating, shopping, or family life rather than appearing as a distinct main activity in a diary. This is why the estimate gives them meaningful shares even though they are not cleanly visible in ordinary activity tables.

The OECD makes a similar methodological point in its discussion of time-use-based social-interaction measures. In How's Life? 2020, Social Connections, the OECD notes that estimates based only on primary activities are likely to underestimate total social activity because they exclude interactions occurring alongside other tasks. Relatedly, How's Life? 2024 reports that people across OECD countries spend on average about 6 hours per week in measured social interactions, but this too is only part of the broader cooperative texture of everyday life.

Why norm-sustaining cooperation is estimated above mutual accommodation​

Both categories are diffuse and difficult to measure directly. The estimate places norm-sustaining cooperation somewhat above mutual accommodation because much of daily life in complex societies depends on sustained compliance with informal and formal expectations: punctuality, queueing, procedural order, traffic conventions, workplace rules, conversational conventions, and routine public civility.

By contrast, mutual accommodation often consists of shorter, more local adjustments embedded in ongoing action:

  • moving aside
  • taking turns
  • small path corrections
  • moment-to-moment adjustment in shared space

These behaviors are constant and important, but they are often brief. That is why they are given a smaller relative share than broad norm-sustaining conduct.

What this estimate does and does not claim​

This estimate does not claim to be a precise species-wide constant. It is a provisional empirical approximation for modern surveyed populations, especially those living in institutionalized, high-coordination societies.

The distribution would likely differ across:

  • small-scale societies
  • child-rearing-heavy households
  • workplaces with high interdependence
  • institutional settings with strong formal rules
  • historical periods with less bureaucratic coordination

In care-heavy households, active support would probably take a larger share. In highly institutionalized settings, norm-sustaining cooperation might increase. In collective labor or hunting settings, shared coordination could become even more dominant.

So the table above should be read as a defensible empirical working estimate, not a final measurement.

Concise interpretation​

If cooperation is divided into these four forms, the best empirical approximation is that shared coordination occupies the largest portion of cooperative time in modern adult life, norm-sustaining cooperation forms the next largest share, and active support and mutual accommodation each occupy smaller but still important portions.

References​