Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Altruism and self-interest — whether and how action can aim at another’s good rather than one’s own — psychological egoism and its rivals, the empathy–altruism debate and self–other merging, inclusion of others in the self and identity fusion, team reasoning and group-directed preferences, identity in the utility function, the evolution of unselfish behaviour (kin, reciprocal and group selection), and the extent of the self as it bears on what counts as self-interest (ADR-062).
28 of 2004 LIT documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIT-469 v3 | Reasons and Persons | Parfit (1984), Clarendon Press; DOI-10.1093/019824908X.001.0001 is the 1986 reprint online. Four loosely connected parts, per the author’s abstract: self-defeating theories of rationality and morality; what one person can rationally want at different times, and attitudes to time; personal identity, where “most of us … have certain beliefs about this subject that are false, but hard to give up”; and obligations to future generations, with the non-identity problem and the Repugnant Conclusion. By the chapter abstracts, Part III defends a reductionist view on which identity is not what matters and draws consequences for self-interest and distributive justice. Unread. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description, its chapter abstracts and the table of contents; the book is in copyright and no lawful full text was reachable (the Internet Archive copies are lending-only and were not opened), so it is unread and no NOTE is filed. By its publisher’s account, Part III argues that most of us hold false beliefs about personal identity, that psychological continuity and connectedness, not identity, is what matters, and that this should change our attitudes to our own future, to rationality and to morality. The record already leans on it at second hand: Birch’s Relation R, Velleman’s reading of Frankfurt and the identity-and-ethics survey all cite it. |
| LIT-497 v2 | The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour. I | Hamilton (1964), J. Theor. Biol. 7:1–16. A one-locus model in which an individual’s genotype affects relatives’ fitness. Weighting each effect by Wright’s coefficient of relationship r gives “inclusive fitness”, which tends to be maximized as classical fitness is. An action that costs the actor is favoured only if the benefit to a relative exceeds 1/r times the cost: more than two brothers, four half-brothers or eight first cousins (§5). The increase of mean inclusive fitness is proved only for giving traits; the model is not about morality. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-401); worth reading as the source of inclusive fitness and of the rule the moral-psychology literature calls Hamilton’s rule. It is a population-genetic model with non-overlapping generations, random mating and weak selection, and its rule appears as −k > 1/r (§5), not in the later rb > c form. It proves that mean inclusive fitness increases only for genes whose total effect on others is non-negative (giving traits); for harming traits it shows only that selection points uphill. It says nothing about morality: it is the kin domain of morality-as-cooperation in its biological form, read as biology. |
| LIT-506 v2 | The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour. II | Hamilton (1964), J. Theor. Biol. 7:17–52. Part I’s model is generalized, “unrigorously”, into two principles: an animal values a neighbour’s fitness against its own by their relationship, and its social discriminations evolve to make relationship more determinate. They are applied to alarm calls, clones and colonies, the haplodiploid hypothesis for hymenopteran sociality, multiple mating, fights between relatives, sibling competition and seed provisioning. Evidence is anecdotal, and the author reports where it runs against him. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-410); worth reading as the place inclusive fitness is turned into two general principles (valuing neighbours by relatedness; evolving discrimination that makes relatedness determinate) and tried on warning behaviour, social insects, clones, fights and parental care. The principles are offered as an “unrigorous” generalization of Part I, and the evidence is anecdotal and, by the author’s account, partly contrary. Its §6 on fights is the one place in Hamilton’s pair that touches contests: relatives should fight less, a kin-weighted version of the restraint Maynard Smith and Price derived without kinship. |
| LIT-514 v3 | Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame | Boehm (2012), Basic Books. By the publisher’s account, the moral sense is “a sophisticated defense mechanism”: group punishment of bullies, thieves, free riders and psychopaths over six million years made social selection favour altruists and bred conscience, virtue and shame. The chapter list adds a “selection-by-reputation hypothesis” and its test. Unread: filed from the description and chapter list. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the chapter list, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. The book is lending-only at the Internet Archive (item moraloriginsevol0000boeh) and sold by Basic Books. What it argues is known here only from the publisher’s description, labelled as such. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1683 | Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior | Sober & Wilson (1998). Part I defends multilevel (group) selection as a cause of evolutionary altruism; Part II argues that the case for psychological egoism fails and that natural selection likely produced genuinely other-directed ultimate desires, distinguishing evolutionary from psychological altruism. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. The Internet Archive’s copy (untoothersevolut00sobe) is for print-disabled readers only and is not lent, and no open edition was found. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Stich 2006 (LIT-1737). |
| LIT-1698 | Team Reasoning and Intentional Cooperation for Mutual Benefit | Sugden (2015). Social preferences cannot represent trust: on Rabin-style intention-based preferences, the common-knowledge practice of trust in the Trust Game is not an equilibrium. Team reasoning can, but not Bacharach’s version, which maximizes a team utility, trades members’ interests off against each other and needs no assurance that others reason as a team. Sugden’s Schema of Cooperative Team Reasoning aims at each member’s benefit over a maximin benchmark, follows existing practices and binds only given reciprocal reason to believe the others endorse it. So a market exchange that serves each party’s interest can still be intended as mutual benefit, neither self-interest nor sacrifice. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1288) from the published version, open under CC BY-NC-ND at the Journal of Social Ontology; worth reading as Sugden’s own later statement of team reasoning, read in place of his 2003 paper (LIT-1782, Unavailable), and for its claim that team reasoning cannot be reduced to self-interest or to social preferences by redefining payoffs, which bears on the owner’s thesis (CLAIM-491). |
| LIT-1699 | Pair-Bonding as Inclusion of Other in the Self: A Literature Review | A five-page review, by Aron’s group, of research on the self-expansion model’s principle of inclusion of other in the self (IOS) in long-term romantic relationships. In a close relationship each partner treats the other’s resources, perspectives and identities as to some extent their own (Aron et al. 1991). The single-item IOS circle scale is the standard measure. It tracks feeling and behaving close and correlates with cognitive signs of inclusion, such as slower self-trait judgements where the partner differs and self–partner confusions in memory. Studies since 2013 link greater overlap to self-like treatment of the partner: comparisons, pain and sleep, and honour-based aggression. They also add a two-dimensional model of relational self-change and a perceived-inclusion construct. No new data. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1276), in place of LIT-1706, which could not be reached; worth reading as a current map of what the IOS scale is used for and validated against. Its account of Aron et al. 1991 is two sentences. |
| LIT-1700 v2 | Is empathy-induced helping due to self–other merging? | Batson et al. (1997). Experiments (two, by the SEP’s account, LIT-1729) found empathy-induced helping was not explained by perceived self-other merging: empathy predicted helping with merging controlled, and merging did not mediate it, supporting the empathy-altruism hypothesis that empathic concern evokes genuinely other-directed motivation. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. OpenAlex lists no open copy and an exact-title web search found none posted by an author or publisher; nothing on the authors’ Kansas pages. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: the Stanford Encyclopedia’s “Empirical Approaches to Altruism” (LIT-1729) and Miyazono and Inarimori 2021 (LIT-1783). |
| LIT-1703 | Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation | Markus & Kitayama (1991). A theoretical review. Cultures differ in how they construe the self. The independent construal, most clearly American and western European, is a bounded self defined by internal attributes. The interdependent construal, found in Japan and other Asian cultures but also in African, Latin American, Hindu and southern European ones, is a self defined by relationships with specific others in specific contexts: “others are included within the boundaries of the self” (p. 245), though it “does not result in a merging of self and other” (p. 228). The authors predict, and review evidence, that interdependent selves know more about others and describe themselves by context. They expect them to feel and express “other-focused” emotions (shame, sympathy, amae) more and “ego-focused” ones (anger, pride) less. They expect them to pursue achievement for others and to show modesty, not self-enhancement. They name a third option between selfishness and selflessness: “a self defined in relationship to others” (p. 247). | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1275) from the published APA scan posted by Markus on her own website (hazelmarkus.com/research); worth reading as the classic statement that cultures construe the self as more or less inclusive of others. For the owner’s thesis (CLAIM-491) it supports the premise, a self that includes others, and names the thesis’s middle term, “an alternative to selfishness … besides selflessness” (p. 247). It does not support the step to self-interest: the authors deny merging and allow “genuine, other-oriented, altruistic” motives. The evidence is mostly cross-national contrasts, often second-hand or unpublished, with culture standing in for an unmeasured construal. |
| LIT-1706 | Close relationships as including other in the self | Aron, Aron, Tudor & Nelson (1991). In a close relationship the other’s resources, perspectives and characteristics are treated as partly one’s own: allocations to close others resemble allocations to self, and self/spouse traits are confused in reaction times. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. OpenAlex lists no open copy and an exact-title web search found none posted by an author or publisher; nothing on the Aron lab’s pages; perception.org has only a catalogue entry. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Branand, Mashek and Aron 2019 (LIT-1699). |
| LIT-1716 | Legacies, Immortality, and the Future: The Psychology of Intergenerational Altruism | Wade-Benzoni (2006). Argues that intergenerational beneficence, sacrifice now for people who will live later and cannot reciprocate, is motivated in part by the desire to leave a legacy, a route to symbolic immortality, and that this motive can be engaged to promote decisions that favour future generations. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher; Scholars@Duke and Duke’s faculty pages list it without a file. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Wade-Benzoni, Sondak and Galinsky 2010 (LIT-1717). |
| LIT-1724 | How Will I Be Remembered? Conserving the Environment for the Sake of One’s Legacy | Zaval, Markowitz & Weber (2015). Legacy motivation, wanting to be remembered well, predicted pro-environmental intentions and donations, and writing about how one wants to be remembered increased donations to an environmental charity and pro-environmental intentions. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher. A PDF on the Wharton marketing department’s site was not used, since none of the authors is there; the authors’ own deposits at Columbia Academic Commons hold the study materials and data, not the article. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Wickersham et al. 2020 (LIT-1750). |
| LIT-1728 v2 | Reinterpreting the empathy–altruism relationship: When one into one equals oneness | Cialdini, Brown, Lewis, Luce & Neuberg (1997). In three questionnaire studies (five tests, N = 90, 74 and 263) students imagined a near stranger, an acquaintance, a friend or a close family member in need and chose how much to help. Closeness raised both empathic concern and “oneness” (the IOS scale with a “we” item). Empathic concern predicted helping, and still did with personal distress and sadness controlled, but with oneness entered it no longer did, while oneness still predicted helping. The authors read empathic concern as a signal of oneness and the helping as “nonaltruistic”: with self and other merged, the selfish–selfless distinction “loses its meaning”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1444) from a scan of the published article on a University of Wisconsin course page (https://users.ssc.wisc.edu/~jpiliavi/965/Cialdini%201997.pdf, JPSP 73(3), pp. 481–494, with an OCR text layer); worth reading as the empirical case that helping among close others tracks perceived self–other oneness, not empathic concern. Read it knowing that every helping measure is a hypothetical choice about an imagined person (eviction, orphaned children, a phone call), that the evidence is regression and path analysis of ratings taken after the helping choice, and that the authors call oneness-based helping “nonaltruistic”, not egoistic. |
| LIT-1729 | Empirical Approaches to Altruism | The SEP survey of the empirical egoism–altruism debate, revised in 2025. On the standard account, altruism needs an ultimate desire for another’s well-being; biological and social-science senses of “altruism” settle nothing about it. Batson’s experiments make a strong case against the aversive-arousal and social-punishment versions of egoism. Self-other merging is a different challenge: only numerical identity with the helped person would make helping egoistic, and none of the four measures used by Cialdini et al. and Batson et al. (IOS, “we”, perceived similarity, trait-rating difference) tests for it. The authors report that Batson et al. (1997) avoided Cialdini’s methodological problems and found empathy’s role “clearly evident”, and that a preregistered study (N = 680) supports the empathy–helping link. Altruism is still not shown: divine punishment, principlism, non-moral norms, and habitual or Pavlovian helping remain to be ruled out. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1274), in place of LIT-1700 and LIT-1728, which could not be reached; worth reading as the shortest neutral account of the 1997 merging exchange the record holds: it quotes both papers’ measures, and it argues that a merging criterion must be one of numerical identity to matter for egoism. It does not report the 1997 results in numbers. |
| LIT-1735 | Identity fusion: The interplay of personal and social identities in extreme group behavior | Swann, Gómez, Seyle, Morales & Huici (2009). A single pictorial item picks out people “fused” with their country (about 40% of Spanish students): fusion is bimodal, distinct from identification and specific to one group. The fused said they would fight and die for Spain more than other members would, and challenging or activating their personal self raised that further, with no effect on the nonfused. Personal and social identity act together, against self-categorization theory’s functional antagonism. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1256) from the published version on the site of co-author Gómez’s IDENFUSION group at UNED; worth reading as the record’s closest empirical work to the owner’s thesis (CLAIM-491): a measured self–group overlap in which the personal self is kept, not depersonalized, and in which a challenge to the personal self raises willingness to fight and die for the group. Self-reported intentions, Spanish students only. |
| LIT-1737 | Evolution, altruism and cognitive architecture: a critique of Sober and Wilson’s argument for psychological altruism | Stich (2006/2007). Restates Sober and Wilson’s argument that natural selection is unlikely to have made us pure egoists: for parental care, an ultimate desire for the child’s welfare is a more reliable mechanism than hedonism, which depends on beliefs linking helping to one’s own pleasure and pain. Stich rejects three of their four arguments outright. The fourth, that hedonism’s linking beliefs could be undermined by evidence, fails if the links are sticky sub-doxastic states. So the argument leaves egoism open; it does not show it true. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1282) from the published version on Stich’s own site; worth reading as a close restatement and critique of Sober and Wilson’s evolutionary argument for psychological altruism, read in place of Unto Others (LIT-1683, Unavailable), and for its definitions of egoism, altruism and ultimate desire, which the owner’s thesis (CLAIM-491) has to meet. |
| LIT-1752 | Economics and Identity | Akerlof & Kranton (2000). Adds identity, “a person’s sense of self”, to the utility function: U = U(own actions, others’ actions, I), where I depends on one’s assigned social categories, how well one’s own traits match the category’s ideal, and how far one’s own and others’ actions follow the category’s prescriptions. Violating one’s prescriptions costs utility (Is); others’ violations cost it too (Io), and the loser may pay to “respond”, harming the violator. A two-person game shows when such responses deter. Applied to occupational segregation by sex, to “oppositional” identities chosen by the socially excluded, and to wives who earn more yet still do most of the housework, it yields predictions standard models do not. Evidence is illustrative: ethnographies, a 70-household vignette survey, census shares and a Panel Study of Income Dynamics regression. Identity is modelled as self-image to be maintained, not as concern for a group’s welfare. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1311) from the journal’s typeset text deposited in Duke University’s repository DukeSpace (hdl.handle.net/10161/1993; Unpaywall labels it the submitted version, but it carries the journal’s pagination and copyright line), fetched through the repository’s own API; worth reading as the founding statement of identity economics: identity as self-image in the utility function, with prescriptions and identity externalities, applied to gender at work, exclusion and the household. Read it knowing that its evidence is illustrative, that two of its models are solved only in appendices “available from the authors upon request”, and that the self it puts in utility is a self-image to be kept, not a self that takes in the group’s welfare. |
| LIT-1754 | Death and the Afterlife | Scheffler (2013), his 2012 Tanner Lectures with replies. The afterlife conjecture: much of what we value depends on our confidence that humanity will go on after our deaths (a “collective afterlife”), as the doomsday and infertility scenarios show, so we care about people who will live after us, whom we will never know. He also argues that personal immortality would drain value of its point. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher. Open Library lists the book for print-disabled readers only. Scheffler’s 2012 Tanner Lectures, the book’s first two chapters, are open at tannerlectures.org. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Scheffler’s 2012 Tanner Lectures (LIT-1779) and Cottingham’s NDPR review (LIT-1784). |
| LIT-1759 | Surviving Death | Johnston (2010). Argues that personal identity is response-dependent (“Protean”), so the self-interest that seems to require survival is not fixed; the good person, who identifies with the interests of humanity at large, survives death in the onward life of others. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. The Internet Archive’s copy (survivingdeath0000john) is for print-disabled readers only and is not lent, and no open edition was found. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Johnston 2023 (LIT-1788), in which Johnston withdraws the book’s account of survival. |
| LIT-1760 | It’s Only a Matter of Time: Death, Legacies, and Intergenerational Decisions | Wade-Benzoni, Tost, Hernandez & Larrick (2012). In experiments, reminders of death increased people’s allocations of resources to future generations, an effect the authors attribute to the desire to leave a positive legacy. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher; Scholars@Duke and the co-authors’ Duke pages list it without a file. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Hurlstone et al. 2020 (LIT-1785). |
| LIT-1766 | Recategorization and Prosocial Behavior: Common In-Group Identity and a Dual Identity | A review of the common in-group identity model applied to helping. Recategorizing two groups as one removes in-group bias in helping: in a laboratory study, help to an original out-group member rose to the in-group level; at a football stadium, White fans complied with a Black interviewer’s request more often when he wore their university’s hat (59% vs 36%). Commons-dilemma studies show the same for cooperation. But the form of the shared identity matters. White students helped a Black student least when he called himself a Black person or a Black Colgate student (a dual identity), and most when he called himself a Colgate student. In the second study, empathic concern partly mediated that effect on helping; attitudes did not. The authors trace the dual identity’s cost to majority members projecting their group’s standards onto the superordinate category, and to identity threat. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1286), in place of LIT-1710 and LIT-1709, which could not be reached; worth reading as the model’s authors’ own account of how an enlarged “we” extends helping across group lines, with the qualification that the “we” which helps is the helper’s version of it. |
| LIT-1775 | Social Identity and Close Relationships: What is the Connection? | Brewer argues that close relationships and group memberships are two distinct forms of social identity, each a way the individual self is extended to include others: the relational self is personalized (particular, non-interchangeable others), the collective self depersonalized (a symbolic group). They are not two routes to one need for belonging. Measures of group and interpersonal attachment (r = .46 and .33) and of loneliness separate them, and men and women weight them differently. She models each level as a regulatory system balancing opposed needs (uniqueness and similarity; autonomy and intimacy; separation and inclusion), with transfer between them. The model predicts two collectivisms: relational collectivists draw tight in-group boundaries, while individualists identify more readily with large inclusive groups. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1290), in place of LIT-1757, which could not be reached; worth reading as the tripartite self’s author restating it in her own words, with the claim that both relationships and groups extend the self, in two different ways. |
| LIT-1777 | A theory of generativity and its assessment through self-report, behavioral acts, and narrative themes in autobiography | McAdams & de St. Aubin (1992). Models Erikson’s generativity, concern for and commitment to the next generation, as seven features: cultural demand, inner desire (for symbolic immortality and to be needed), concern, belief in the species, commitment, action and narration. Introduces the Loyola Generativity Scale and a checklist of generative acts, with evidence from adult samples and autobiographies. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher; a summary on a Notre Dame page was unreachable, Northwestern’s Foley Center pages return 404, and copies on Scribd and a commercial site were not used. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Kruse and Schmitt 2012 (LIT-1691) and Sandoval-Obando et al. 2026 (LIT-1693). |
| LIT-1779 | The Afterlife (Tanner Lectures I and II) | Scheffler’s 2012 Tanner Lectures, the source of the first two chapters of Death and the Afterlife. By “the afterlife” he means that other people will live on after one’s own death. Imagined reactions to a doomsday scenario (the earth destroyed thirty days after one’s death) and to P. D. James’s infertility scenario (no one dies early, but no one more is born) show that this matters to us in its own right and as a condition of other things mattering. Without it many projects, and perhaps even reading and eating well, would lose their point (the “afterlife conjecture”). So, in one respect, humanity’s survival matters more to us than our own or our loved ones’. Scheffler reads this as dependence on future people, not as unsuspected altruism toward them, and as showing that individual valuing presupposes humanity as an ongoing historical project. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1298), in place of LIT-1754, which could not be reached; worth reading as the exact statement of the afterlife conjecture and of what Scheffler does and does not infer from it: our dependence on future people, not altruism toward them. The third essay, the commentaries and the replies are in the book only. |
| LIT-1782 | The Logic of Team Reasoning | Sugden (2003). A logic of team reasoning, in which agents ask “what should we do?” and act on their part of the best joint plan, conditional on assurance that others reason likewise; it explains coordination (the Hi-Lo game) that individual best-reply reasoning cannot. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. OpenAlex lists no open copy and an exact-title web search found none posted by an author or publisher; PhilArchive has a record (SUGTLO) that answered HTTP 403, so whether it holds a file is unknown; UEA’s repository and RePEc for the 2005 reprint in Teamwork offer no download. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Sugden 2015 (LIT-1698). |
| LIT-1783 | Empathy, Altruism, and Group Identification | A conceptual paper. It takes Cialdini et al.’s claim that empathy-induced helping is due to self-other merging and asks what “merging” could coherently mean. May argued that every reading either attributes absurd beliefs or fails to explain helping. The authors answer that merging is group identification: in empathizing with Y, X comes to conceive of Y as part of X’s social self, so Y’s welfare becomes constitutive of “our” welfare. They argue that this reading is behaviourally adequate, because it explains Batson’s results in the same way as minimal-group favouritism, and psychologically plausible, because it posits a non-doxastic self-representation rather than a belief in being two bodies. Helping so motivated is then altruistic at the individual level and egoistic at the group level. The empirical dispute with Batson et al. (1997) is set aside. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1277), in place of LIT-1728 and LIT-1700, which could not be reached; worth reading as the only work in the record that states the owner’s thesis for empathic helping in a precise form: concern for another’s welfare is non-instrumental, and that welfare is constitutive of the helper’s first-person plural welfare. It offers no measure of group identification apart from empathy. |
| LIT-2003 v2 | Major evolutionary transitions in individuality | West, Fisher, Gardner & Kiers (2015), doi:10.1073/pnas.1421402112. A transition in individuality is defined by mutual dependence and negligible within-group conflict, which Table 1 shows occur apart. It proceeds by forming a cooperative group and then transforming it, with no clear border between the steps. An ecological benefit together with how groups form explains the transitions; kin discrimination and repression of competition played minor roles. Source of THEORY-1351, read in NOTE-1538. | Active |
| LIT-2004 v2 | The Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation | Henrich & Muthukrishna (2021), doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-081920-042106. Registered unread from the owner’s synthesis of 2026-11-04, whose §4 cites it for the claim that genetic evolution alone cannot explain the scale and cultural variability of human cooperation, so cultural evolution, norms, institutions and culture–gene coevolution matter too. That is unverified until read. The record holds the genetic mechanisms (THEORY-567, THEORY-655, THEORY-663) and the moral psychology (THEORY-468, THEORY-539), not the cultural-evolutionary account. | Unfetched — looked for 2026-11-04, not reached. A lawful free copy exists on the authors’ lab site: https://coevolution.fas.harvard.edu/sites/projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/culture_cognition_coevol_lab/files/annurev-psych-081920-042106.pdf. From this client it returns HTTP 403 with an “Access Denied” page, so it was not fetched and no attempt was made to get past it. LSE Research Online’s record (eprints.lse.ac.uk/107611) holds no file. OpenAlex and Europe PMC (no email address sent, ADR-008) list no open copy, and the publisher’s PDF is paywalled. A copy the owner supplies returns it to reading. |