altruism.
15 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-401 | The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour. I | A one-locus, non-overlapping-generation model in which genotypes affect relatives’ fitness. Splitting each effect into a part on genes identical by descent (weight r) and a “diluting” part on other genes shows that the former alone fixes the direction of selection, and defines inclusive fitness. Mean inclusive fitness provably increases when no genotype harms others; with harm it only points uphill. A costly act spreads iff −k > 1/r: twice the cost to a sib, eight times to a cousin. | Read |
| NOTE-410 | The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour. II | Generalizes Part I into two principles (value neighbours by relatedness; discriminate so relatedness is determinate) and applies them qualitatively. Haplodiploid sisters (r = 3/4) favour worker altruism, weakened by multiple mating (eight drones give about 0.31); sibs fight to the death only for a gain above 50%; clonal colonies cooperate and sexual aggregates do not fuse. Evidence is anecdotal, partly contrary (Australian halictines), and anomalies are put down to error or misinterpretation. | Read |
| NOTE-1256 | Identity fusion: The interplay of personal and social identities in extreme group behavior | Five preliminary studies and three two-wave experiments with Spanish students. A single pictorial item, the self as a small circle wholly inside a circle for Spain, picks out the “fused” (about 40%). Fusion is bimodal, related to but distinct from identification (r = .26 to .56) and specific to one group. The fused said they would fight and die for Spain more than others would. Activating their personal self, by challenging negative self-views or asking what they would fight for themselves, raised that willingness further; it did nothing for the nonfused. The authors read this as personal and social identity being “functionally equivalent” in the fused, against self-categorization theory’s functional antagonism. | Read |
| NOTE-1274 | Empirical Approaches to Altruism | A survey by Doris, Stich, Walmsley and Schulz. Under the standard account, altruism means an ultimate desire for another’s well-being, and evolutionary and social-science senses of the word do not bear on it. Batson’s experiments tell against the social-punishment and aversive-arousal versions of egoism. Self-other merging would make helping egoistic only if the helper took herself to be numerically identical with the other. The four measures used in the 1997 exchange test likeness or something unclear, not identity. On the causal question, the entry says only that Batson et al. corrected Cialdini’s methods and found empathy’s role “clearly evident”. Altruism is still unproven: divine punishment, principles, norms and habit remain open explanations. | Read |
| NOTE-1275 | Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation | A theoretical review. Cultures construe the self as independent, bounded and defined by inner attributes (most clearly American), or as interdependent, defined by relationships with specific others in specific contexts (Japanese and other Asian, also African, Latin American, Hindu, southern European). For the interdependent self “others are included within the boundaries of the self”, without “a merging of self and other”. This is predicted to shape cognition (more knowledge of others, contextual self-description), emotion (other-focused over ego-focused emotions) and motivation (achievement for others, modesty over self-enhancement). The authors name “a self defined in relationship to others” as an alternative to both selfishness and selflessness. | Read |
| NOTE-1276 | Pair-Bonding as Inclusion of Other in the Self: A Literature Review | A short review by Aron’s group. In a close relationship each partner experiences 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, validated as subjective closeness. It goes with cognitive signs of inclusion: slower “me/not-me” judgements on traits where the partner differs, more self–partner confusions in memory, plural pronouns. Recent studies tie overlap to self-like treatment of a partner. High-overlap people keep a positive view of a partner shown inferior. Their sleep suffers more from a partner’s pain. Honour-endorsing men high in overlap are more aggressive toward a partner’s moral violation. The review adds a two-dimensional model of relational self-change and a measure of perceived inclusion. No new data. | Read |
| NOTE-1277 | Empathy, Altruism, and Group Identification | Cialdini et al. said empathy-induced helping is due to self-other merging. May argued that no reading of “merging” is both coherent and explanatory. The authors read it as group identification. In empathizing with Y, X comes to conceive of Y as part of X’s social self, so Y’s welfare is constitutive of X’s first-person plural welfare. This explains Batson’s similarity-induced helping in the same way as minimal-group favouritism, and needs no belief in being two bodies, since identification is a Pushmi-Pullyu representation (Salice and Miyazono). Such helping is altruistic at the individual level and egoistic at the group level. The empirical rebuttal by Batson et al. (1997) is set aside as out of scope. | Read |
| NOTE-1282 | Evolution, altruism and cognitive architecture: a critique of Sober and Wilson’s argument for psychological altruism | Sober and Wilson argue, from parental care, that natural selection would favour an ultimate desire for the child’s welfare over hedonism, on grounds of reliability. Stich grants that evolutionary and psychological altruism are independent. He rejects their arguments from imperfect belief–affect correlation, from the engineering cost of strong affect, and from redundancy. He takes seriously the fourth: hedonism depends on beliefs linking helping to one’s own feelings, and beliefs can be undermined. But if those links are sticky sub-doxastic states, hedonism is as reliable as altruism, so the argument leaves egoism open. | Read |
| NOTE-1286 | Recategorization and Prosocial Behavior: Common In-Group Identity and a Dual Identity | The common in-group identity model’s authors on helping. Recategorizing two groups as one removed in-group bias in helping in a laboratory study (posters for an out-group member rose to the in-group level), and at a stadium White fans complied with a Black interviewer more when he wore their university’s hat (59% vs 36%). A dual identity is another matter: White students volunteered least for a Black student who called himself a Black Colgate student, as little as for one who called himself Black, and most when he called himself a Colgate student. Empathic concern partly mediated the effect on helping (β for condition .46 to .35); attitudes did not. Sample sizes are not reported. | Read |
| NOTE-1288 | Team Reasoning and Intentional Cooperation for Mutual Benefit | Theories of social preference can always fit an observed choice by positing a preference for it, and their non-trivial forms cannot represent trust: on Rabin’s intention-based preferences, (send, return) in a Trust Game cannot be common knowledge in equilibrium. Team reasoning can, but Bacharach’s version maximizes a team utility that trades members off and needs no assurance. Sugden’s Schema of Cooperative Team Reasoning aims at a mutually beneficial practice, in which each member gains over her maximin payoff, and binds only when there is reciprocal reason to believe the others endorse it. A market exchange in each party’s interest can then be intended as cooperation for mutual benefit. | Read |
| NOTE-1290 | Social Identity and Close Relationships: What is the Connection? | Close relationships and group memberships are two forms of social identification, “processes by which the individual self is extended to include others”: the relational self personalized, the collective self depersonalized. They are distinct systems, not two routes to one need for belonging. Group and interpersonal attachment correlate only .46 (anxiety) and .33 (avoidance), and loneliness has relational and collective factors. Each level regulates opposed needs, as hunger and thirst do, with transfer between them. Relational collectivists bound their in-groups tightly; individualists identify more with large, inclusive groups and show as much in-group favouritism toward them. | Read |
| NOTE-1298 | The Afterlife (Tanner Lectures I and II) | Scheffler’s 2012 Tanner Lectures. “The afterlife” is the survival of other people after one’s death. Few would be indifferent to the earth’s destruction thirty days after their death, or weigh its goods against its evils. Many projects would lose their point, and in an infertile world, where no one dies early but no one more is born, even enjoyments might. Humanity’s survival matters to us in its own right and as a condition of other things mattering. In that respect it matters more than our own survival or our loved ones’. Scheffler reads this as our dependence on future people, not altruism toward them, and as showing that individual valuing presupposes humanity as an ongoing project. | Read |
| NOTE-1311 | Economics and Identity | Puts identity, a person’s self-image as a member of social categories, into the utility function. Utility falls when one’s own actions break one’s category’s prescriptions (Is) and when others’ actions do (Io); the second can be relieved, at a cost, by acting against the violator. A two-person game gives four equilibria and shows taxes and rhetoric shifting them. Applications: gender-typed jobs and their erosion after the women’s movement; the socially excluded choosing an oppositional identity even with no peer pressure; and the gender asymmetry in housework, where husbands’ share rises to no more than 37% however little they earn. Evidence is illustrative. The authors call identity a nonpecuniary motive and never call it self-interest. | Read |
| NOTE-1444 | Cialdini, Brown, Lewis, Luce & Neuberg — When one into one equals oneness | In three questionnaire studies, students imagined a near stranger, acquaintance, friend or close family member in need and chose how much costly help to give. Closeness raised empathic concern and oneness (the IOS circles plus a “we” item), and both predicted helping; with oneness entered, empathic concern dropped to non-significance in every test, while oneness kept predicting. The authors read empathic concern as an emotional signal of oneness and call the helping “nonaltruistic”, not egoistic. All helping is hypothetical and the case is regression on correlated ratings. | Read |
| NOTE-1538 | West, Fisher, Gardner and Kiers — Major evolutionary transitions in individuality | A colloquium review, with no new data or model. A transition in individuality is defined by two conditions: mutual dependence, where parts can replicate only within the larger unit, and negligible within-group conflict. It proceeds in two steps, forming a cooperative group and then transforming it, with borders that are not clear. Table 1 shows that each condition occurs without the other. Across transitions, what does the work is an ecological benefit together with how groups form, through clonal bottlenecks, lifetime monogamy or vertical transmission of clonal symbionts. Kin discrimination and the repression of competition played “relatively minor roles”. | Read |