“Group selection” is often cited as an explanation for the survival of altruism. The idea of group selection is a controversial one — much effort has been expended on its justification (and refutation). Relatively little effort has gone into formally testing whether or not it can actually provide a reasonable explanation for altruistic behaviour. This paper concentrates solely on whether or not...

Masses of experiments have shown individual preference for fairness which seems irrational. The reason behind it remains a focus for research. The effect of spite (individuals are only concerned with their own relative standing) on the evolution of fairness has attracted increasing attention from experiments, but only has been implicitly studied in one evolutionary model. The model did not invo...

Previous research on political orientations, which can be understood as one’s leftversus right-wing attitude, has shown that some personality factors yield explanatory power. In the current work, we consider the role of altruism – a personality construct which does not exclusively map onto one of the broad personality dimensions typically studied. Altruism was predicted to relate to left-wing a...

The weak selection approximation of population genetics has made possible the analysis of social evolution under a considerable variety of biological scenarios. Despite its extensive usage, the accuracy of weak selection in predicting the emergence of altruism under limited dispersal when selection intensity increases remains unclear. Here, we derive the condition for the spread of an altruisti...

Two sources of workers’pro-social motivation have been considered in the literature: actionoriented altruism and output-oriented altruism. This paper presents evidence from a …eld experiment, which aims to identify and quantify them. The idea behind our experimental design is to measure in a precise way the level of e¤ort exerted in an environment that elicits purely sel…sh behavior and compare...

Smallholder farmers rely on labor exchange to generate agricultural work when cash is rare and credit unavailable. Reciprocal altruism, biased by genetic kinship, has been implicated as the mechanism responsible for labor exchange; however, few empirical tests confirm this proposition. Competitive altruism could be operating if people differ in ability and use this information as a criterion fo...

Darwinian selection should preclude cooperation from evolving; yet cooperation is widespread among organisms. We show how kin selection and reciprocal altruism can promote cooperation in diverse 2×2 matrix games (prisoner's dilemma, snowdrift, and hawk-dove). We visualize kin selection as non-random interactions with like-strategies interacting more than by chance. Reciprocal altruism emerges f...

Citation: Everett JAC, Faber NS, Crockett MJ and De Dreu CKW (2015) Economic games and social neuroscience methods can help elucidate the psychology of parochial altruism. The success of Homo sapiens can in large part be attributed to their highly social nature, and particularly their ability to live and work together in extended social groups. Throughout history, humans have undergone sacrific...

introduction: empathy refers to a personality character that has a great role in communication with others. thus, proper evaluation and education of empathy in medical students is important for medical education. because previous studies had suggested that physician’s empathy may reduce with clinical trainings, in this study we decided to measure the empathy score among medical students. method...

Please cite this article in press as: Hur, Y.-M. J dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2012.05.016 This essay describes Rushton’s work on altruism over the past 40 years. During his academic career, he changed his theoretical approach from social learning theory to trait theory to sociobiology. My essay includes five sections. The first gives an overview of Rushton’s work on altruism. The second reviews ...