Cooperation is fundamental to the evolution of human society. We regularly observe cooperative behaviour in everyday life and in controlled experiments with anonymous people, even though standard economic models predict that they should deviate from the collective interest and act so as to maximise their own individual payoff. However, there is typically heterogeneity across subjects: some may cooperate, while others may not. Since individual factors promoting cooperation could be used by institutions to indirectly prime cooperation, this heterogeneity raises the important question of who these cooperators are. We have conducted a series of experiments to study whether benevolence, defined as a unilateral act of paying a cost to increase the welfare of someone else beyond one's own, is related to cooperation in a subsequent one-shot anonymous Prisoner's dilemma. Contrary to the predictions of the widely used inequity aversion models, we find that benevolence does exist and a large majority of people behave this way. We also find benevolence to be correlated with cooperative behaviour. Finally, we show a causal link between benevolence and cooperation: priming people to think positively about benevolent behaviour makes them significantly more cooperative than priming them to think malevolently. Thus benevolent people exist and cooperate more.

In general, modeling data from blocked and split-plot response surface experiments requires the use of generalized least squares and the estimation of two variance components. The literature on the optimal design of blocked and split-plot response surface experiments, however, focuses entirely on the precise estimation of the fixed factor effects and completely ignores the necessity to estimate the variance components as well. To overcome this problem, we propose a new Bayesian optimal design criterion which focuses on both the variance components and the fixed effects. A novel feature of the criterion is that it incorporates prior information about the variance components through log-normal or beta prior distributions. The resulting designs allow for a more powerful statistical inference than traditional optimal designs. In our algorithm for generating optimal blocked and split-plot designs, we implement efficient quadrature approaches for the numerical approximation of the new optimal design criterion. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.