What motivates players to cooperate?

[Flaborized]

For example, why do some people go out of their way to fix a hull breach? Is it just them getting fed up with being cold and slow and having to wear internals, and nobody else is fixing it? Do they just want to help others by neutralizing a hazard? Or do they just wanna do what their job description says?

I think it's a mix of all three. Another aspect of this is that it's pretty satisfying to fix things. Healing someone from -300% or fixing a massive breach and seeing people use an area again or building a new cloner and watching people use it just feels good. It's nice to feel useful in-game and feel like you had a positive impact on someone else's round.

I think a lot of players do it because their job is "supposed to" as well. Healing people as a doctor or cleaning stuff as a janitor is interesting/fun or at least leads to interesting/fun stories and situations. Nothing says you have to do your job, of course, but you're leaned into it the supplies you get.

I think a particularly good example of design encouraging cooperation is genetics of all things. Activating someone's potential genes benefits both the geneticist (loads of materials and chromosomes, possibly finding rare or exotic genes ie: high complexity) and the person who's getting their genes activated (cool superpowers). Very little is locked out of genetics without having an extra person, but it's way way more effective and faster to cooperate with the crew because of the benefits you get. This incentives working together and rewards both parties with stuff they want, be it doing genetics way faster or getting cool strong superpowers. 

Another fantastic example is security. It's a sort of different idea: Instead of someone in the crew doing something good to help the station as a whole, security works together with themselves to achieve a common goal. You'll notice that in rounds with active security, the security frequency on comms consistently sees a lot of use. This is unlike pretty much any other department! There's a lot of factors in why you see this behavior in security and not other departments in my opinion. A simple one is that officers and the HoS can't be traitors. It's easy to put your trust in another officer as security because of this. 

Communication (and therefore cooperation) are just vital to security doing well in a given round, which is another part of why you see it a lot. It's very useful to transmit information over sec comms when in other jobs most problems aren't over-arching enough to justify it. "So-and-so is a traitor, we need to arrest them" or "That welder tank that was used to blow up X has so-and-so's fingerprints on them" makes sense to broadcast because that info could be useful to anybody in sec as anybody in sec might come across "so-and-so". There's not really an equivalent in medical comms or research comms. The HoS is also seen as "in charge" of security, and when they order a security officer to arrest a dude or release a dude ect. people are quite likely to listen, while other heads of staff don't have the same authority usually. This is, of course, because the job is whitelisted and thus there's a high chance the HoS knows what they're talking about.

All of this stuff mostly applies to Main/2, I don't have any experience on RP so I dunno how much this rambling resonates with happenings on that server.