Reply - Behavioural game theory perspectives on cooperation: A reply to ‘Nurturing, nudging and navigating the increasingly precarious nature of cooperation in public health: The cases of vaccination and organ donation’ by Larson and Toledo

The focus of this journal issue is on various aspects of cooperation, a phenomenon that has exceptionally important implications for social policy. In his final address as President of the Royal Society in 2005, Lord Robert May, former Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK government, characterized the problem of understanding the evolution and maintenance of cooperation as ‘the most important unanswered question in evolutionary biology, and more generally in the social sciences’ (May, 2006: 109). It is difficult to disagree, given the myriad threats to human communities across the globe that require human cooperation for the avoidance of catastrophic outcomes. Three of the most serious that spring immediately to mind are nuclear annihilation, the avoidance of which requires cooperation among nuclear weapon states in limiting the production, proliferation, and use of nuclear weapons (Cimbala, 2002; Narang, 2017); antimicrobial resistance, threatening global pandemics of incurable diseases unless doctors cooperate by restraining antibiotic prescription (Colman et al., 2019; Krockow, et al., 2022); and climate change, the consequences of which can be mitigated only by numerous governmental and other decision-making bodies across the globe cooperating and collectively restraining the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (Milinski et al., 2008; Van Lange and Rand, 2022). Larson and Toledo (this issue) focus on the problems of vaccination and organ donation, both of which require individual population members to cooperate by getting vaccinated against potentially epidemic diseases and by donating organs.