A mechanism for social selection and successful altruism.
Abstract
Within the framework of neo-Darwinism, with its focus on fitness, it has been hard to account for altruism behavior that reduces the fitness of the altruist but increases average fitness in society. Many population biologists argue that, except for altruism to close relatives, human behavior that appears to be altruistic amounts to reciprocal altruism, behavior undertaken with an expectation of reciprocation, hence incurring no net cost to fitness. Herein is proposed a simple and robust mechanism, based on human docility and bounded rationality that can account for the evolutionary success of genuinely altruistic behavior. Because docility-receptivity to social influence-contributes greatly to fitness in the human species, it will be positively selected. As a consequence, society can impose a "tax" on the gross benefits gained by individuals from docility by inducing docile individuals to engage in altruistic behaviors. Limits on rationality in the face of environmental complexity prevent the individual from avoiding this "tax." An upper bound is imposed on altruism by the condition that there must remain a net fitness advantage for docile behavior after the cost to the individual of altruism has been deducted.
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A high degree of cooperation tends to be facilitated by reduced aggression.
“because a high degree of cooperation tends to be facilitated by reduced aggression (Simon, 1990; Melis et al., 2006; Cieri et al., 2014).”
From Hypotheses for the Evolution of Reduced Reactive Aggression in the Context of Human Self-Domestication (2019) · cites this paper as Simon, 1990
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- Authors
- Simon, H. A.
- Affiliations
- Carnegie Mellon University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Simon, Herbert A.
- Venue
- Science
- Published
- 1990-12-21
- Volume
- 250
- Issue
- 4988
- Pages
- 1665-1668
- ISSN
- 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
- 1095-9203
- OpenAlex
- W2010648543
- Cited by
- 769
- References
- 9
- Citations by year
- 2026: 5 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 16 · 2023: 15 · 2022: 21 · 2021: 16 · 2020: 17 · 2019: 17 · 2018: 36 · 2017: 15 · 2016: 28 · 2015: 36 · 2014: 35 · 2013: 33 · 2012: 55
- FWCI
- 46.21
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Science (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Genetics › Evolution and Genetic Dynamics
- Keywords
- altruism, social selection, docility, bounded rationality, reciprocal altruism, fitness, social influence, social tax, evolution of cooperation, human behavior
- MeSH terms
- Altruism, Economics, Humans, Learning, Models, Psychological, Politics, Selection, Genetic, Social Behavior
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