Study: Brains Want to Cooperate

"We say people act this way because the brain is hard-wired to cooperate -- it associates cooperation with reward," said Gregory Berns, a professor at the Emory University Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.

During their experiments, Berns and the Emory team discovered that when pairs of volunteers cooperated with one another, the regions of the brain known as reward circuits were activated.

"These are the same regions of the brain that are activated when certain drugs are taken, or when you receive an unexpected sum of money," Berns said.