Carpe diem? Not for long.

In the perpetual debate about whether humans are good, greed scored another point.

Researchers in Europe and North America invented a game in which players had to cooperate to receive both individual cash and a reward for achieving a public-good  – the example used was avoiding climate change. The longer players were willing to wait for their pay-off, the bigger the reward.

But their research report, published in the peer-reveiewed journal Nature Climate Change, shows that while many individual players opted for the generational reward, achieving it required cooperation – and none of the groups met that goal.

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