The U.S. women’s soccer team has been showing a commanding World Cup performance in France. What would it take for a group of robotic players to show such skill (besides agility and large batteries)? For one, teamwork. But coordination in even simple games has been difficult for artificial intelligence to learn without explicit programming. New research takes a step in the right direction, showing that when virtual players are rewarded for social influence, cooperation can emerge.

Humans are driven not just by extrinsic motivations—for money, food, or sex—but also by intrinsic ones—for knowledge, competence, and connection. Research shows that giving robots and machine-learning algorithms intrinsic motivations, such as a sense of curiosity, can boost their performance on various tasks. In the new work, presented last week at the International Conference on Machine Learning, AIs were given a “social” drive.

“This is a truly fascinating article with a huge potential for expansions,” says Christian Guckelsberger, a computer scientist at Queen Mary University of London who studies AI and intrinsic motivation but was not involved in the work.