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Cooperative Phoneotypes: Exploring Phone-based Behavioral Markers of Cooperation

Cooperation is a fundamental human concept studied across multiple social and biological disciplines. Traditional methods for eliciting an individual's propensity to cooperate have included surveys and laboratory experiments and multiple such studies have connected an individual's cooperation level with her social behavior. We describe a novel approach to model an individual's cooperation level based on her phoneotype i.e. a composite of an individual's traits as observable via a mobile phone. This phone sensing-based method can potentially complement surveys, thus providing a cheaper, faster, automated method for generating insights into cooperation levels of users. Based on a 10-week field study involving 54 participants, we report that: (1) multiple phone-based signals were significantly associated with participant's cooperation attitudes; and (2) combining phone-based signals yielded a predictive model with AUCROC of 0.945 that performed significantly better than a comparable demography-based model at predicting individual cooperation propensities. The results pave the way for individuals and organizations to identify more cooperative peers in personal, social, and commerce related settings.