Katherine McAuliffe

Associate Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience

Bachelor of Science, 2003

Now is the time … to see how we can harness the intergroup cooperation strategies that feel most accessible to people and maybe to draw out the similarities in values as a way of bridging this divide. So, it’s a difficult time, but so necessary given the climate we’re facing.

As a research professor, Dr. Katherine McAuliffe, BSc’03, studies how cooperative behavior is sustained in humans, how it develops in children and how it evolves. Work in her lab—the Cooperation Lab at Boston College—combines approaches from psychology, anthropology and evolutionary biology to address big questions about the origins of cooperation.

How do children learn to cooperate? Do cooperative abilities develop similarly among children in different cultures? What can animals as diverse as dingoes in Australia, meerkats in the Kalahari Desert and the Blue Streaked Cleaner Wrasse (a kind of fish) show us about being cooperative?

Posing questions and seeking answers about human behaviour has propelled Katherine ever since she was undergrad at King’s—and even before. The daughter of university professors, she played at being a professor when she was a little kid, setting up a desk and neatly arranging office supplies.

“It’s all I ever wanted to do,” says Katherine, who went to Cambridge University for her master’s degree and Harvard for her PhD. She has taught and conducted research at Boston College since 2006.

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What goes on in The Cooperation Lab?

Our motto is that we study the forces that shape and sustain cooperative societies. I like that because it’s very broad. We do work on mostly humans, and primarily young humans, four to 12-year-olds mainly because adolescents are hard to work with because they’re so busy. And, then we do adult work as well and some non-human work. The Zoom call I was on just before this was about a potential fish study.

In the cooperation lab, my students and postdocs work on all things related to cooperation. We’ve recently taken a virtue lens to our work, focusing principally on honesty, fairness, trustworthiness and forgiveness as virtues that figure into cooperative societies, trying to understand how they develop in childhood and how they are present in adults.

I think a key thing in my lab is that we do a lot of cross-cultural work, trying to understand how these behaviours are expressed and developed under diverse societal contexts. So, we work in Uganda and Peru and India. I’m just working on a paper where we have data from Vanuatu. We’re now also working with collaborators in Tanzania, Ecuador and Bolivia. We’re trying to work with children in basically as many different countries as possible.

One of my students is doing work specifically on intergroup conflict. Another is focusing really specifically on forgiveness. Another is looking at inequality, so taking the fairness lens and thinking about children’s experiences of inequality, especially now that we know that societal levels of inequality are on the rise. How do children think we should deal with inequality? How do they perceive inequalities? How do they respond to inequalities?

In the context of the current political climate, does it feel like these virtues— cooperation, fairness, honesty—are fading?

The U.S. is such a politically polarized country and what is interesting is that people on both sides probably hold the same virtues as really important to their identities. Fairness, for example, is really important no matter what side you’re on.

Now is the time for this kind of work to see how we can harness the intergroup cooperation strategies that feel most accessible to people and maybe to draw out the similarities in values as a way of bridging this divide. So, it’s a difficult time, but so necessary given the climate we’re facing.

You also lead up something called The Virtue Project. What is that?

The Virtue Project is a collaboration between my lab, the Cooperation Lab, and another faculty member in my department, Liane Young, and her Morality Lab. It’s the union of morality and cooperation.

Through the lens of virtue, I started to take a more expansive view of what kind of behaviours relate to cooperation. We have several projects on forgiveness now, for example, and I don’t think we would be doing those had it not been on this work under the umbrella term of virtue.

What do you mean when you talk about “virtue”?

We all have a notion of what the right thing is. That could be I should be honest, I should be fair, I should be more generous. So, you have an idea of what you ought to be doing. And then we have what we actually do, which, for most of us, doesn’t fall totally in line with what we ought to be doing. There’s usually a gap. Everyone lies a little bit. Everyone’s a little bit selfish. We talk about virtue in terms of the mechanism that closes the gap. What is it that helps people bring their behaviour in line with their idea of what the ideal is?

How did you get into this line of research?

It was definitely born (during my undergrad at King’s), when I was doing all these marine biology classes. And then I joined Hal Whitehead’s lab. He’s a professor in the biology department at Dalhousie and he runs this lab on cetaceans. He mostly does sperm whale work.

I got super interested in social learning and culture in whales. I was fascinated. I wanted to be an animal behavior person forever.

Then, I went to Cambridge to do more of that sort of thing. I was planning to do a primate project where I was looking at the evolution of babysitting. Under what circumstances do animals leave their offspring with other adults? That is a cooperative form of behavior. When I started to get into that, I learned about all these other animals that are super cooperative: meerkats, mole rats, banded mongooses. There are so many exciting examples of really cooperative systems in other species.

Because of that, I went to study meerkats. It was the best project I could possibly be involved with because it was bridging social learning that I learned about whales with Hal Whitehead and this interest in cooperation. That locked in my interest in cooperation and culture.

In grad school, I was doing more animal stuff. I thought I would have a PhD that was maybe primate-focused, maybe included other mammals. And then I studied fairness. Humans are obsessed with fairness, and it plays into our social relationships.

So, I started looking for fairness in other species and I was just not seeing anything that looked like fairness in humans. Are concerns about fairness unique to the human species? I had done a monkey project on fairness, and then my colleagues and I said, “Let’s do a project with kids and do a comparison to see what children would do in this task.”

It was fascinating to study children because they care so much about fairness. And you can ask them a question and they’ll give you an answer.