Introduction

“We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual…….”——Lord Palmerston (Henry John Temple)Cooperation is a form of social interaction widely observed in humans and non-human social speciesOne potentially critical social factor has remained largely unstudied, because the vast majority of existing research has primarily focused on the impact of cooperative decisions between individuals that are 'anonymous'. This approach may fail to fully capture the essence of cooperative interactions since, in daily life, interactions between individuals are generally relationally-dependentRecently there has been an increasing interest in examining how exposure to competitive interactions impacts individuals’ risky cooperation. A body of literature at the interface of psychology and behavioral economics has consistently reported that individuals embedded in a competitive setting showed higher levels of cooperation as reflected by their increased contribution to a public goodTo answer these questions, we designed a novel experiment in which participants engaged in two stages: a competition stage and a cooperation stage (Fig. Experimental task structure. (The interdependence theory and the recent study described above