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In their original invitation, editors Kaye Schoonhoven and Frank Dobbin urged the contributors to this volume to be substantive and scholarly in their approach to their essays. I have tried to honor their request by summarizing the results of a programmatic line of scholarly inquiry on a thorny academic problem. It is also a problem of enormous and enduring real-world importance: As the world continues to confront divisive and escalating conflicts over how to share increasingly scarce global resources, we need to have a better understanding of when and why people are willing to cooperate to solve such problems.

The awarding in October of 2002 of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics 1 Technically the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, established in 1968.1 to Daniel Kahneman and Vernon Smith might have profound implications for the survival of Homo economicus, which has long occupied a privileged place in the minds of economists and decision-making theorists. The species has endured many challenges and proven quite adaptable, changing to accommodate a cascade of findings inconsistent with its original conception. Homo economicus now faces a potentially more serious challenge: the resurgence of Homo sapiens, a more coherent and biologically grounded model for human decision-making, informed by theory and data from across the scientific spectrum.