Adaptations for Reciprocal Altruism
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Adaptations for Reciprocal Altruism Yao Zhu, Shunhang Huang and Jin-Ying Zhuang School of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
Synonyms Reciprocal exchange
cooperation;
Reciprocity;
Social
Definition According to Hamilton (1964), altruism entails suffering a cost to confer a benefit. Trivers (1971) defines reciprocal altruism as an exchange of altruistic behaviors between individuals so as to produce a net benefit to both individuals. Traits that enhance reciprocal altruism, including punishment of nonreciprocators, have been defined as reciprocal altruism adaptations.
Introduction There is a long-standing misconception that evolution is based on a fierce competition and therefore rewards only selfish behavior. On the contrary, cooperation can be observed across life, including among genes, cells, individual
organisms, and groups of organisms, including diverse human societies ranging from huntergatherer tribes to nation states. In his seminal work Inclusive Fitness, Hamilton (1964) describes the evolution of altruism among genetically related individuals. Trivers (1971) suggests that reciprocal cooperation can be favored between unrelated individuals, calling the circumstance wherein individuals help one another in turn and preferential aid those who helped them in the past, reciprocal altruism. He proposed three prerequisite conditions for the evolution of reciprocal altruism. First, the fitness benefits to the recipient of help must outweigh the costs to the benefactor. Second, the probability of repeated interactions among the same individuals must be very high. Third, there must be a symmetry of donor role-recipient role exchanges, with a sufficiently frequent reversal to yield roughly equal experiences at both roles. Nowak (2006) suggests that the aforementioned reciprocal altruism is a type of direct reciprocity, wherein the probability of another encounter between the individuals exceeds the cost-to-benefit ratio of the altruistic act. Additionally, there can be indirect reciprocity and network reciprocity. Indirect reciprocity is thought to promote cooperation only when the probability of one’s reputation being known exceeds the costto-benefit ratio of the altruistic act. Meanwhile, network reciprocity is thought to be favored when the benefit-to-cost ratio exceeds one’s average number of neighbors. Some scholars argue that
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 T. K. Shackelford, V. A. Weekes-Shackelford (eds.), Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1202-1
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reciprocal altruism is a mutual behavior that should be distinguished from altruism because it can initiate a causal chain of events that lead to a net benefit for both actors and recipients. For this reason, several authors suggest that it would be more appropriate to adopt the term reciprocity or reciprocal cooperation in place of reciprocal altruism (West et al. 2011). Reciprocal altruism raises intriguing questions about human nature, such as why people
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