Neuroscience
If human nature has been shaped entirely by evolutionary pressures, then why are so many people prepared to help complete strangers? Surely those ancestors of ours with an altruistic bent would have been wiped out by the more ruthless and self-serving among our forebears. Joseph Henrich and colleagues believe the answer lies, somewhat paradoxically, in the universal human willingness to punish unfair behaviour.
Henrich’s team used three economic games involving real money to test the behaviour of 1762 participants from 15 different societies on five continents. Across the world, from the Samburu in Kenya to the Sursurunga in Papua New Guinea, they found people playing anonymously were willing to sacrifice their own winnings to punish a player who was unfair in the way they shared money with themselves or a third party.
Willingness to punish varied across the cultures, but in every society, less equal sharing was more likely to be punished. And crucially, those societies that showed the greatest willingness to punish unfair behaviour also turned out to be the most altruistic, as judged by their performance in the games. “You evolve into a more cooperative being if you grow up in a world where there are punishers” Joseph Henrich told Science.
However, whilst welcoming the cross-cultural nature of the study design, and acknowledging the contribution it makes to the debate on altruism, evolutionary psychologist John Tooby told Science that he was wary of reading too much into these anonymous games – “…in ancestral societies, people lived in small groups where everybody knew each other. In that environment, anonymous punitive interactions would have been rare to nonexistent, so there would have been no selection to adapt to such situations”.
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Henrich, J., McElreath, R., Barr, A., Ensminger, J., Barrett, C., Bolyanatz, A., Cardenas, J.C., Gurven, M., Gwako, E., Henrich, N., Lesorogol, C., Marlowe, F., Tracer, D. & Ziker, J. (2006). Costly punishment across societies. Science, 312, 1767-1770.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Supplementary material on the methodology.
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Researchers use economic games to investigate how people cooperate in real-life. Now a team led by Benedikt Herrmann, at the University of Nottingham, have identified striking differences in the way university students from different countries play one...
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Eye-catching studies that didn't make the final cut this fortnight: The right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex plays a vital role in our willingness to punish unfair behaviour by others, even at a cost to ourselves. The boundaries between different...
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- Men Are Torturers, Women Are Nurturers...
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Neuroscience
Was altruism borne out of a universal willingness to punish?
If human nature has been shaped entirely by evolutionary pressures, then why are so many people prepared to help complete strangers? Surely those ancestors of ours with an altruistic bent would have been wiped out by the more ruthless and self-serving among our forebears. Joseph Henrich and colleagues believe the answer lies, somewhat paradoxically, in the universal human willingness to punish unfair behaviour.Henrich’s team used three economic games involving real money to test the behaviour of 1762 participants from 15 different societies on five continents. Across the world, from the Samburu in Kenya to the Sursurunga in Papua New Guinea, they found people playing anonymously were willing to sacrifice their own winnings to punish a player who was unfair in the way they shared money with themselves or a third party.
Willingness to punish varied across the cultures, but in every society, less equal sharing was more likely to be punished. And crucially, those societies that showed the greatest willingness to punish unfair behaviour also turned out to be the most altruistic, as judged by their performance in the games. “You evolve into a more cooperative being if you grow up in a world where there are punishers” Joseph Henrich told Science.
However, whilst welcoming the cross-cultural nature of the study design, and acknowledging the contribution it makes to the debate on altruism, evolutionary psychologist John Tooby told Science that he was wary of reading too much into these anonymous games – “…in ancestral societies, people lived in small groups where everybody knew each other. In that environment, anonymous punitive interactions would have been rare to nonexistent, so there would have been no selection to adapt to such situations”.
__________________________________
Henrich, J., McElreath, R., Barr, A., Ensminger, J., Barrett, C., Bolyanatz, A., Cardenas, J.C., Gurven, M., Gwako, E., Henrich, N., Lesorogol, C., Marlowe, F., Tracer, D. & Ziker, J. (2006). Costly punishment across societies. Science, 312, 1767-1770.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Supplementary material on the methodology.
- Cross-cultural Reflections On The Mirror Self-recognition Test
The performance of young children on the 'mirror self-recognition test' varies hugely across cultures, a new study has shown. This is the test that involves surreptitiously putting a mark on a child's forehead and then seeing how they react...
- How Group Cooperation Varies Between Cultures
Researchers use economic games to investigate how people cooperate in real-life. Now a team led by Benedikt Herrmann, at the University of Nottingham, have identified striking differences in the way university students from different countries play one...
- Extras
Eye-catching studies that didn't make the final cut this fortnight: The right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex plays a vital role in our willingness to punish unfair behaviour by others, even at a cost to ourselves. The boundaries between different...
- Chimps And Toddlers Lend A Helping Hand
It’s been argued that only humans display truly altruistic behaviour, but now, under laboratory conditions, Michael Tomasello and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology have observed altruistic behaviour by chimpanzees towards...
- Men Are Torturers, Women Are Nurturers...
...tell it to Lynndie England!! All right, let's start at the beginning. My sound-byte-worthy headline was derived from a paper published this week in Nature: Singer T, Seymour B, O'doherty JP, Stephan KE, Dolan RJ, Frith CD. Empathic neural responses...