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If you live in New York, you know what it feels like to regularly have your subway ride interrupted by a stranger with a sad personal tale, asking for a couple of bucks. Some beggers talk about how they just lost their job, or share some pictures of their kids with big dreams and high hopes. The people in this train were expecting this kind of story, but what happened took them all by surprise.

Certain brain areas are enlarged and white-matter tracts were better connected in people with larger social networks

By leading the Americans in his audience step by step through the thought process, sociologist Sam Richards sets an extraordinary challenge: can they understand - not approve of, but understand - the motivations of an Iraqi insurgent? And by extension, can anyone truly understand and empathize with another?

Human cooperation is an evolutionary puzzle. Unlike other creatures, people frequently cooperate with genetically unrelated strangers, often in large groups, with people they will never meet again, and when reputation gains are small or absent. These patterns of cooperation cannot be explained by the nepotistic motives associated with the evolutionary theory of kin selection and
the selÆsh motives associated with signalling theory or the theory of reciprocal altruism. Here we show experimentally that the
altruistic punishment of defectors is a key motive for the explanation of cooperation. Altruistic punishment means that individuals punish, although the punishment is costly for them and yields no material gain. We show that cooperation nourishes if altruistic punishment is possible, and breaks down if it is ruled out