The origin of altruistic behavior has long been a challenge for students of evolutionary biology. The populations with altruistic individuals do better than those without altruists; however, the altruists within a population do worse than the non-altruists and their prevalence in the population decreases due to individual selection. Under certain conditions, the strength of group selection, i.e...

In recent years, kidney paired donation (KPD) has been extended to include living non-directed or altruistic donors, in which an altruistic donor donates to the candidate of an incompatible donor-candidate pair with the understanding that the donor in that pair will further donate to the candidate of a second pair, and so on; such a process continues and thus forms an altruistic donor-initiated...

Compassion is a key motivator of altruistic behavior, but little is known about individuals' capacity to cultivate compassion through training. We examined whether compassion may be systematically trained by testing whether (a) short-term compassion training increases altruistic behavior and (b) individual differences in altruism are associated with training-induced changes in neural responses ...

Altruistic punishment is suggested to explain observed high levels of cooperation among non-kin related humans. However, laboratory experiments as well as ethnographic evidence suggest that people might retaliate if being punished, and that this reduces the level of cooperation. Building on existing models on the evolution of cooperation and altruistic punishment, we explore the consequences of...

Recent research on the notion of altruism in terrestrial life has focused on certain altruistic behaviors, which are regarded as beneficial to animal life, especially with respect to individual animal species. Such findings throw light on individualoriented mechanisms and their evolution in helping to clarify so-called intentional interactions between individuals based on discrimination of othe...

Possible associations of gender, age, and participation in volunteer activities with altruistic behavior of Chinese adolescents were investigated. A representative sample of 1,105 Hong Kong Chinese adolescents (457 boys, 648 girls) were recruited from 20 schools. Results of multiple regression analyses indicated that there was a positive age effect on altruistic behavior. In addition, a positiv...

We study the effect of combining selfishness and altruism in atomic congestion games. We allow players to be partially altruistic and partially selfish and determine the impact of this behavior on the overall system performance. Surprisingly, our results indicate that, in general, by allowing players to be (even partially) altruistic, the overall system performance deteriorates. Instead, for th...

The science mapping community offers insights and points to trends in scientific inquiry by revealing connections among publications, authors, terminology and citation patterns. The authors applied the process of creating science maps to topics compiled by GuideStar to reveal altruistic motives driving nonprofit organizations (NPOs). From data mined from nearly four million web pages from 125,0...

Altruistic behavior improves the welfare of another individual while reducing the altruist's welfare. Humans' tendency to engage in altruistic behaviors is unevenly distributed across the population, and individual variation in altruistic tendencies may be genetically mediated. Although neural endophenotypes of heightened or extreme antisocial behavior tendencies have been identified in, for ex...

Young adolescents are generally considered to be self-absorbed. Studies indicate that they lack relevant general cognitive abilities, such as impulse control, that mature in early adulthood. However, their idealism may cause them to be more intolerant of unfair treatment to others and thus result in their engaging in more altruistic behavior. The present study aimed to clarify whether young ado...