Reciprocal altruism in humans may be made possible in part by the existence of information processing mechanisms for the detection of overt cheating. However, cheating may not always be readily detectable due to the division of labor. Subtle cheating poses a serious problem for the evolution of altruism. This article argues that subtle cheating may have exerted selective pressures on early homi...

Gratitude is an emotion and a trait linked to well-being and better health, and welcoming benefits to oneself is instrumentally valuable. However, theoretical and empirical work highlights that gratitude is more fully understood as an intrinsically valuable moral emotion. To understand the role of neural reward systems in the association between gratitude and altruistic motivations we tested tw...

One of the enduring puzzles in biology and the social sciences is the origin and persistence of intraspecific cooperation and altruism in humans and other species. Hundreds of theoretical models have been proposed and there is much confusion about the relationship between these models. To clarify the situation, we developed a synthetic conceptual framework that delineates the conditions necessa...

The origin of cooperation is a central problem in evolutionary biology and social science. Cultural group selection and parochial altruism are popular but controversial evolutionary explanations for large-scale cooperation. Proponents of the cultural group selection hypothesis argue that the human tendency to conform—a consequence of our reliance on social learning— maintained sufficient betwee...

There are three concerns regarding Rachlin’s altruism model. First, proximal causal mechanisms such as those identified by cognitive neuroscientists and behavioral neuropharmacologists are not emphasized. Second, there is a lack of clear testable hypotheses. And third, extreme forms of altruism are emphasized rather than common forms. We focus on an overarching theme – proximal mechanisms of in...

ONE of the central dogmas of modern behavioral ecology is that blood kinship plays a critical role in understanding the evolution of social behavior, particularly of costly social behavior such as altruism and cooperation. But it was not always so, and what I would like to do in this Perspectives is provide some historical context that led up to William Hamilton’s seminal work developing inclus...

I argue that Rachlin’s notion of self control is imprecise and not well suited to the discussion of altruism. Rachlin’s broader agenda, to improve collective welfare by identifying behavioral mechanisms that increase altruism, neglects the fact that altruism is neither necessary nor sufficient for desirable social outcomes. ∗I thank Philip Babcock, Vincent Crawford, Jim Moore, and Joel Watson f...

The evolutionary legacy hypothesis proposes that an evolved reciprocity-based psychology affects human behavior in anonymous one-shot interactions when reciprocity is not explicitly possible. Empirical support rests on experiments showing that altruism among adults increases in the presence of stylized eye spots or faces. Such stimuli do not affect material payoffs, but they are assumed to acti...