The docility hypothesis holds that human social learning produces genuinely altruistic behaviors as a maladaptive by-product. This article examines five possible sources of such altruistic mistakes. The first two mechanisms, the smoke-detector principle and the cost-accuracy tradeoff, are not specifically linked to social learning. Both predict that it may be adaptive for cooperators to allow s...

Background: Altruistic ethics is one of the most important topics for Muslim thinkers, especially the mystics. Among Iranian mystics, the works of Attar Neishabouri are remarkable in terms of addressing humanitarian concepts. Attar had paid particular attention to the type of human being due to the numerous works and the familiarity with the sources of jurisprudence and interpretation. This res...

Empathy has been proposed to be a proximate mechanism underlying altruistic behavior. However, both empathy and altruistic behavior differ between human individuals with low and high socioeconomic status. Here we investigated whether subjective socioeconomic status (SSS) modulates the relationship between neural activity to perceived pain in others and human altruistic behaviors in a real-life ...

Background: Previous anthropological studies suggested that altruistic punishment is important for sustaining cooperation in large groups. In the clinical literature, major depressive disorder (MDD) has been associated with guilt driven pathological altruism. However, previous neuroeconomical studies suggested that altruism in MDD does not include forms of altruistic punishment. Methods: We use...

BACKGROUND Major depressive disorder (MDD) is associated with functional abnormalities in fronto-meso-limbic networks contributing to decision-making, affective and reward processing impairments. Such functional disturbances may underlie a tendency for enhanced altruism driven by empathy-based guilt observed in some patients. However, despite the relevance of altruistic decisions to understandi...