Strong reciprocity means that people willingly repay gifts and punish the violation of cooperation and the norms of fairness even in anonymous encounters with strangers and forms part of the human paradox of altruism. Angel Sanchez and Jose. A. Cuesta (GISC/Mathematics, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) have published a paper that preposes that altruism may arise from individual selection.To quote from the abstract,” Recently, strong reciprocity, i.e., the predisposition to cooperate with others and to punish non-co-operators at personal cost, has been proposed as a schema for understanding altruism in humans. While behavioural experiments support the existence of strong reciprocity, its evolutionary origins remain unclear: group and cultural selection are generally invoked to compensate for the negative effects that reciprocity is assumed to have on individuals. Here we show, by means of an agent-based model inspired on the Ultimatum Game, that selection acting on individuals capable of other-regarding behaviour can give rise to strong reciprocity.”
Altruism may arise from individual selection
Understanding altruism
- March 21st, 2004
Comments
@ 21:26
Altruism doesn’t exist. We only do what we want to do. Sometimes we do something that we know we’ll suffer from, but it’s still our brain that gives the signal to do it.
And it’s often negative reinforcement that makes us want to do it–to alleviate negative thoughts, to stop that nagging voice.
Helping others makes us feel good. Period. We always gain something, and that’s why we do it. It feels good.
@ 07:13
That’s exactly NOT what the puzzle of strong reciprocity is about — evidence that individuals will contribute to others and punish free-riders without reward and sometimes when such action exacts a cost. To say that our brain gives us the signal to do it is no explanation — it’s a tautology to see that we do what we do because we do what we do. The explanations that have been offered so far are evolutionary — such behavior can be shaped by selection pressures.