You seem to be interpreting my question as one of already knowing they are 'graded' but disputing that graded would lead to cooperation and then jumping into a disagreement with that interpretation.

But I didn't know the nature of the organization of the agents in the first instance that built cooperation in as a prescribed behavior (that's what I was getting at when I said "shared understanding" previously).

I also don't agree that absence of cooperation would necessarily amount to working against. It could have been the case that agents cooperated purely out of a convergence of self interest, even absent any prescribed behavior, or that they don't cooperate but also don't work against a goal.

"It's not prescribed it's..." you know what I mean, just insert your preferred magic word.