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Cited by 339

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 11 of the 11 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Upstream reciprocity and the evolution of gratitude

Open access
Nowak, Martin A, Roch, Sébastien·2007·Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Abstract

If someone is nice to you, you feel good and may be inclined to be nice to somebody else. This every day experience is borne out by experimental games: the recipients of an act of kindness are more likely to help in turn, even if the person who benefits from their generosity is somebody else. This behaviour, which has been called ‘upstream reciprocity’, appears to be a misdirected act of gratitude: you help somebody because somebody else has helped you. Does this make any sense from an evolutionary or a game theoretic perspective? In this paper, we show that upstream reciprocity alone does not lead to the evolution of cooperation, but it can evolve and increase the level of cooperation if it is linked to either direct or spatial reciprocity. We calculate the random walks of altruistic acts that are induced by upstream reciprocity. Our analysis shows that gratitude and other positive emotions, which increase the willingness to help others, can evolve in the competitive world of natural selection.

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Metadata

Authors
Nowak, M. A., & Roch, S.
Venue
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Published
2006-12-19
Volume
274
Issue
1610
Pages
605-610
ISSN
  • 0080-4649 (ISSN-L)
  • 0962-8452
  • 1471-2954
OpenAlex
W2133476822
Cited by
339
References
11
FWCI
13.83
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Upstream reciprocity and the evolution of gratitude. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1098/rspb.2006.0125
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Nowak, M. A., & Roch, S. (2007). Upstream reciprocity and the evolution of gratitude. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2006.0125

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

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