We conduct online field experiments in large real-world social networks in order to decompose prosocial giving into three components: (1) baseline altruism toward randomly selected strangers, (2) directed altruism that favors friends over random strangers, and (3) giving motivated by the prospect of future interaction. Directed altruism increases giving to friends by 52 percent relative to rand...

Does altruism and morality lead to socially better outcomes in strategic interactions than selfishness? We shed some light on this complex and non-trivial issue by examining a few canonical strategic interactions played by egoists, altruists and moralists. By altruists, we mean people who do not only care about their own material payoffs but also about those to others, and, by a moralist, we me...

This paper analyzes and compares the incentive properties of some common payment mechanisms for GPs, namely fee for service (FFS), capitation and fundholding. It focuses on gatekeeping GPs and it speci…cally recognizes GPs heterogeneity in both ability and altruism. It also allows inappropriate care by GPs to lead to more serious illnesses. The results are as follows. Capitation is the payment ...

Social psychological theories tend to be primarily concerned with the immediate causes of altruism, whereas evolutionary explanations focus more on the origins and ultimate functions of altruistic behavior. Recent developments in the evolutionary psychology of altruism promise an even richer understanding of this important category of social behaviors. Specifically, new perspectives offered by ...

Although the conditions under which altruistic behaviors evolve continue to be vigorously debated, there is general agreement that altruistic traits involving an absolute cost to altruists (strong altruism) cannot evolve when populations are structured with randomly formed groups. This conclusion implies that the evolution of such traits depends upon special environmental conditions or addition...

BACKGROUND Egalitarianism and altruism are two ways in which people may have attitudes that go beyond the narrowly defined selfish preferences. The theoretical constructs of egalitarianism and altruism are different from each other, yet there may be connections between the two. This paper explores the empirical relationship between egalitarianism and altruism, in the context of health. METHOD...

background: professionalism is currently a chief concern across the continuum of medical sciences and there is a great deal of efforts to clarify its theoretical components and to measure them. for participation of iranian medical scientific society in this universal challenge, there is a need to explain and interpret the state of art of this topic in the world. methods: we selected the most re...

According to evolutionary psychologists, human pro-social behaviour is regulated by evolutionarily developed psychological mechanisms whose role is to solve adaptive problems. The same reasoning can be applied to social discounting, i.e. subjective devaluation of a reward which must be shared with one or more people. Based on reciprocal altruism and inclusive fitness theories, hypotheses were f...