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U.S. one dollar bills blow near the Andalusian capital of Seville in this photo illustration taken on November 16, 2014. A year-long investigation into allegations of collusion and manipulation by global currency traders is set to come to a head on Wednesday, with Britain's financial regulator and six big banks expected to agree a settlement involving around 1.5 billion ($2.38 billion) in fines. The settlement comes amid a revival of long-dormant volatility on the foreign exchanges, where a steady rise of U.S. dollar this year has depressed oil prices and the currencies of many commodity exporters such as Russia's rouble, Brazil's real and Nigeria's naira - setting the scene for more turbulence on world financial markets in 2015. Picture taken November 16, 2014. REUTERS/Marcelo Del Pozo

When you tend to focus on how successful other people are, you automatically display more selfish behaviour, a new study finds.

The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Nottingham. It is common belief that the success of humans lie in their ability to cooperate and work together as a group. However, sometimes, decisions that affects everyone need to be made. In such situations, different people think and act differently. Findings of this new study suggests that successful cooperation in groups depends on how people gather information about their peers, and how they base their cooperative decisions on it.

"The question that our research tries to answer is: 'How do people make decisions when their actions can affect the welfare of others?' More specifically, we want to know how people determine their behaviour when they have to cooperate in groups,” Dr Lucas Molleman, an expert in decision-making and human cooperation in the School of Economics at The University of Nottingham, said in a press statement.

For the study, 200 people were asked to make decisions that would affect their earnings. The participants were divided into groups where they could choose between a selfish option (increasing their own earnings) and an option that benefitted all members of their group. In between making their decisions, people could gather information about their fellow group members about the choices of the majority and information which option paid off best.

"From previous research we know that people differ quite strongly in what kind of information they are interested in: some people are 'majority-oriented' and tend to look at the behaviour of the majority in their group, whereas others are 'success-oriented' and try to find out what kind of behaviour pays off best. In this experiment we studied how these different types of people behave when they have to cooperate in groups," Dr Pieter Van Den Berg from the University of Groningen said. "It turns out that behaviour in groups of success-oriented people was much more selfish than groups of majority-oriented people. As a consequence, the people in the majority-oriented groups tended to earn more money in the experiment since they cooperated more."

The findings clearly suggest that an individual tends to cooperate with others only when he see others cooperating, but can act selfishly if others don't cooperate.

Findings of the study were published online in the academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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