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...

We study the inefficiency of equilibria for several classes of games when players are (partially) altruistic. We model altruistic behavior by assuming that player i’s perceived cost is a convex combination of 1−αi times his direct cost and αi times the social cost. Tuning the parameters αi allows smooth interpolation between purely selfish and purely altruistic behavior. Within this framework, ...

The concept of altruism is used in very different forms by computer scientists,economists, philosophers, social scientists, psychologists and biologists. Yet, in order to be useful in social simulations, the concept "altruism" requires a more precise meaning. A quantitative formulation is proposed here, based on the cost/benefit analysis of the altruist and of society at large. This formulation...

In a growing number of transplant centers worldwide, altruistic donors are accepted to anonymously donate a kidney to a stranger. An important hesitation to expand these transplantation programs is the fear of evoking psychological distress in the altruistic donor after donation. To what extent this fear is justified has not yet been systematically investigated. In this study, 24 altruistic don...