Reciprocal altruism in humans
Reciprocal altruism in humans refers to an individual behavior that gives benefit conditionally upon receiving a returned benefit, which draws on the economic concept – ″gains in trade″.[1] Human reciprocal altruism would include the following behaviors (but is not limited to): helping patients, the wounded, and the others when they are in crisis; sharing food, implement, knowledge.[2]
Scientific viewpoints[edit]
Biology[edit]
In 1902, Peter Kropotkin published his monograph – Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, and demonstrates the survival mechanisms of cooperation, based on various examples of animal and human societies.[12] He attempted to reveal that the law of biological evolution is mutual aid rather than survival competition. Mutual aid and cooperation are the principles of all species’ biological evolution including human beings’, and the concepts resulting in a profound influence upon biological evolution. E.O. Wilson applied the term of ″sociobiology″ as an attempt to explain social behavior of insect and thus explored the evolutionary mechanism of other animals including human such as the social behavior, altruism.[13] He argued that human altruistic behavior, as one of the human nature characteristics, is the result of the genetic inheritance.
In 1971, Trivers published one of the most important biological articles of the 20th century - The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism [2] and introduced the term of ″reciprocal altruism″ to explain the evolution of cooperation. The idea of reciprocal altruism is almost the same as kin selection, except to put emphasis on reciprocation instead of the need for genetic relatedness. It described that an altruistic trait or behavior may be selected, because the recipient will very likely to return benefits to the altruistic sender. If the reproductive benefit that the altruistic sender receives in return is larger than the cost initially incurred by the altruistic action, individuals who engage in this kind of reciprocal altruism will outbreed those who do not. Therefore, a seemingly altruistic trait can spread in a population. The reciprocation can be delayed as long as the individuals stay in the trade, and, so to speak, have sufficient long-term memory. This explains many features of human social life, for example, we do a favor for someone with the expectation that the favor would be remembered, and lead to a return in the future.
As Trivers supported the foundation for reciprocal altruism, Axelrod and Hamilton [11] applied the Game Theory to study the mechanism of reciprocal altruism, and attempted to answer the key question: How altruism spreads when cheating is an all-win strategy used by members of the population. In this paper, Axelrod and Hamilton [11] revealed that reciprocating the assistance from another individual is stable in evolution as long as there are enough altruists in the population. They also demonstrate that a population of altruists can initially emerge through inclusive fitness, helping and receiving help among genetically related individuals. Subsequent work indicates that only a few altruists are initially needed for the emergence of reciprocation in a heterogeneous population.[14]
Some evolutionary biologists, like Richard Dawkins, wholly endorse Axelrod and Hamilton's work in individual selection. In describing genes as being selfish, Dawkins[15] states that the organisms act altruistically against their individual interests in order to help copies of themselves in other bodies to replicate. Essentially, reciprocal altruism is the individual behavior behind selfish motivations. The bird is a prime example in the narrative of Dawkins:[15] those altruistic birds who sacrifice their own interests by reproducing late or less during hard times would not have been able to pass their altruistic genes to the future generations, which will be dominated by the selfish genes from birds who take advantage of the situation by using up others’ food supply to reproduce their own offspring. Nevertheless, some scholars such as K. Lorenz and W. Edwards have been strongly opposed to the individual selection. In contrast, they spearhead the campaign of group selection.
The debate whether individuals/gene or group/species are the basic level/unit of selection has occurred since the 1960s. The major idea of group selection is that individuals may sacrifice their own reproductive interests for the benefit of the survival of the group to which they belong. W. Edwards[16] builds this argument mainly on birth related behaviors of birds. He points out that many bird species with small clutches have prolonged periods before reaching reproductive maturity, and have long breeding seasons sometimes in excess of one year. Other group selection supporters also argue that these behaviors must be social and altruistic in that, for example, when food supply is abundant, clutches are bigger than when food supply is more scarce. Birds thus can regulate their population densities below starvation levels through social conventions. All of these characteristics run contrary to the idea that fitness is defined by individual organisms attempting to selfishly reproduce. However, it soon became clear that group selection was losing the battle. In 1966, George Williams[17] published the influential Adaptation and Natural Selection: a critique of some current evolutionary thought. By the end of the 1960s, a Neo-Darwinian interpretation of the modern synthesis had taken hold and it has become almost a gold standard that the unit of evolutionary analysis is at the individual's and the gene's level. Dawkins, Hamilton, and Trivers represent the mainstream view of individual selection.
Sociology[edit]
Some scholars, such as Michael Taylor, Anatol Rapoport, Robert Keohane, Arthur Stein, Helen Milner and Kennth Oye, point out that reciprocal altruism widely spread in international relations and human society, and international reciprocity is the foundation of the international community. States act in the confidence that their cooperative actions will be repaid in the long term instead of seeking for the immediate benefit, so reciprocal altruism can be seen as generally accepted standards in international relations.[18] On a personal scale, some scholars believe that reciprocal altruism derives from the subjective feeling of individuals and compliance with social rules. Smith put forward an alternative based on the idea of sympathy and indicates that altruistic behavior is the product of the measure of gains and losses, emphasizing that people are easy to compare with others when measuring the gains and losses. Due to this, the subjective sense of fairness exerts an effect on people's altruistic behavior.[19] For humans, social norms can be argued to reduce individual level variation and competition, thus shifting selection to the group level, so human behavior should be consistent with social norms.[20] Altruistic behavior is the result of learning and internalizing these social norms by individuals.