Individuals in cooperatively breeding societies vary largely in the extent to which they help. Heterogeneity in helping effort can be considered as an iterative process of decision-making whereby an individual's decision to help or not is dependent upon their own attributes (state and age), and on the attributes of group members with which they co-reside. My current work is aimed at understanding to what extent helping effort in meerkat societies is heterogenous across individuals, explores the factors contributing to this heterogeneity, and investigates the consequences for group-level processes on which selection might act (reproductive output, persistence, etc).