A concept recently developed by scholars in psychology and biology is “pathological altruism.” (Oakley 2013, Oakley et al. 2012). A pathological altruist is defined as “a person who sincerely engages in what he or she intends to be altruistic acts, but who harms the very person or group he or she is trying to help, often in unanticipated fashion; or harms others; or irrationally becomes a victi...

Empathy has been supposed to be a proximate mechanism of altruistic behavior. We investigated whether empathy for pain drives actions without altruistic effects and how such actions modulate neural responses to others' pain. In two experiments, we asked healthy adults to press a button for no reason when viewing video clips showing faces with pain expressions receiving needle penetration or fac...

A classic issue in the theory of rational choice is whether individuals’ preferences should and can be measured. This paper suggests that studies of altruistic behavior will benefit from trying to measure altruistic preferences. Such an effort would enable scholars to test the separate effect of preferences and situational factors on action. The above suggestions are applied to the case of the ...

Would society be better off, in aggregate economic terms, if altruism was more widely practiced among its members? Here I try to answer this question using an agent based computer simulation model of a simple agricultural society. A Monte Carlo exploration of the parameter landscapes allowed the exploration of the range of possible situations of conflict between the individual and the group. Th...

In renal transplant, there is a well-known deficiency in organ supply relative to demand. Live donation provides superior results when compared with deceased donation including a better rate of graft success and fewer immunologic complications. This deficiency in organs leads to significant morbidity and mortality rates. Alternative avenues have been extensively explored that may expand the liv...

In this paper we consider altruism, a phenomenon widely observed in nature and practical applications, in the prominent model of selfish load balancing with coordination mechanisms. Our model of altruistic behavior follows recent work by assuming that agent incentives are a trade-off between selfish and social objectives. In particular, we assume agents optimize a linear combination of personal...

When there is no central administrator to control the actions of nodes in a distributed system, the users may deviate for personal gain. The BAR model describes the three types of nodes in these environments: Byzantine nodes deviate arbitrarily, Altruistic nodes follow the protocol, and Rational nodes deviate for gain. Previous attempts at writing BAR-Tolerant protocols have relied on a form of...

Cooperation has long been an enigma in the life and social sciences. A possible explanation for the phenomenon is the recently developed idea of strong reciprocity in which agents altruistically reward those that cooperate and altruistically punish those that do not. The acts are altruistic in the sense that when agents punish or reward they incur a cost but receive no material benefit. Both ex...

The conundrum of cooperation has received increasing attention during the last decade. In this quest, the role of altruistic punishment has been identified as a mechanism promoting cooperation. Here we investigate the role of altruistic punishment on the emergence and maintenance of cooperation in structured populations exhibiting connectivity patterns recently identified as key elements of soc...