3 Types of Altruism

Ed writes; Note: Tomasello recently waffled on these findings.

Can you expand on this?

Spontaneous Altruism by Chimpanzees and Young Children.

People often act on behalf of others. They do so without immediate personal gain, at cost to themselves, and even toward unfamiliar individuals. Many researchers have claimed that such altruism emanates from a species-unique psychology not found in humans' closest living evolutionary relatives, such as the chimpanzee. In favor of this view, the few experimental studies on altruism in chimpanzees have produced mostly negative results.

In contrast, we report experimental evidence that chimpanzees perform basic forms of helping in the absence of rewards spontaneously and repeatedly toward humans and conspecifics. In two comparative studies, semi-free ranging chimpanzees helped an unfamiliar human to the same degree as did human infants, irrespective of being rewarded (experiment 1) or whether the helping was costly (experiment 2). In a third study, chimpanzees helped an unrelated conspecific gain access to food in a novel situation that required subjects to use a newly acquired skill on behalf of another individual.

These results indicate that chimpanzees share crucial aspects of altruism with humans, suggesting that the roots of human altruism may go deeper than previous experimental evidence suggested.

=================

So chimps helped folks out as much as human infants helped folks out. I remember similar experiments where an object was just out of reach of the adult human, and -- after watching the adult repeatedly try to get the object and fail -- the infant grabbed the object and brought it closer to the adult; so that the adult could get to it. I guess chimps do, too. I question any solid implication of this, however (though Tomasello et al. felt it deserved mention when publishing their results).

Here is some other research by Tomasello, research which points to an opposite conclusion:

=================

Chimpanzees are rational maximizers in an ultimatum game.

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103, Leipzig, Germany. jensen@eva.mpg.de

Traditional models of economic decision-making assume that people are self-interested rational maximizers. Empirical research has demonstrated, however, that people will take into account the interests of others and are sensitive to norms of cooperation and fairness. In one of the most robust tests of this finding, the ultimatum game, individuals will reject a proposed division of a monetary windfall, at a cost to themselves, if they perceive it as unfair. Here we show that in an ultimatum game, humans' closest living relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), are rational maximizers and are not sensitive to fairness. These results support the hypothesis that other-regarding preferences and aversion to inequitable outcomes, which play key roles in human social organization, distinguish us from our closest living relatives.

=================

=================

Chimpanzees are vengeful but not spiteful.

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany. jensen@eva.mpg.de

People are willing to punish others at a personal cost, and this apparently antisocial tendency can stabilize cooperation. What motivates humans to punish noncooperators is likely a combination of aversion to both unfair outcomes and unfair intentions. Here we report a pair of studies in which captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) did not inflict costs on conspecifics by knocking food away if the outcome alone was personally disadvantageous but did retaliate against conspecifics who actually stole the food from them. Like humans, chimpanzees retaliate against personally harmful actions, but unlike humans, they are indifferent to simply personally disadvantageous outcomes and are therefore not spiteful.

=================

These last 2 abstracts deal with 'altruistic punishment' -- wherein a moral agent takes on a risk or a cost by punishing others who really do deserve it. It explains vigilante behavior and other brain research into activation of pleasure centers when exposed to justice getting "served" on someone.

Disclosure of Conflict of Interest:

Being a former vigilante myself, I have a personal stake in wanting to believe that this research -- research which vindicates both my past behavior and my current "gut-feelings" on the matter -- that this research really does show us how reality really is (rather than showing something else).

;-)

Ed

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 1/23, 8:44pm)

... most people have, through a combination of genetic hardwiring modified by social acculturation, acquired the generally rational viewpoint that one should retaliate against those who aggress against them or treat them unfairly ...

... many of these studies are specifically designed to remove the rewards for retaliation, making the rational response counterintuitive against these instincts and learned behaviors.

That's why, even if it is explained to a person that it is a soulless computer divvying up a cash windfall, many people will still try to punish the computer for splitting up a payout so that the computer gets 99% of the payout and the human gets 1%.  Against a human operator, the threat of such retaliation drives the payout to levels approaching 50/50.

This also explains the irrational behavior of people choosing to vote, even though the odds of their one vote being the decisive one can be millions to one against.  I personally engage in this irrational-seeming behavior, knowing full well how futile this behavior is.  I guess the psychic rewards for protesting bad politicians, however futile the actual results, can be a reward that outweighs the costs of researching politicians and taking the time to go to the polls.

Irony alert:  Is posting comments on an Objectivist website for the edification of others we will never meet, knowing that these posts won't change our lives -- is this an act of altruism, and thus against the principles of Objectivism?

Mortimer Adler stated that you can't say you were happy until your life is at it's end (because, according to him, human happiness is a call-tag for a whole life, well-lived).

Retelling this story of the meeting between Croesus and Solon, Aristotle stresses the point that a life must be completed -- finished -- before we can truly judge whether or not it has been a happy one. "But must no one be called happy while he still lives?" Aristotle asks. Must we, in Solon's words, "see the end"?

Not quite: for, as Aristotle makes plain, it is possible for an old man to look back at his life, almost completed, and say that it has been good. This may seem strange to you at first, but when you think about it for a moment you will see that it really is not.

One example will make this clear to you. You go to a football game. At the end of the first half, you meet a friend of yours in the aisle. He says to you, "Good game, isn't it?'' If it has been well-played so far, your natural response would be to say, "Yes." But if you stop to think for a moment, you will realize that all you are in a position to say, at the end of the half, is that it is becoming a good game. Only if it is well played all through the second half, can you say, when it is all over, that it was a good game.

Well, life is like that. Not until it is really over can you say, "It was a good life" -- that is, if it has been well lived. Toward the middle, or before, all you can say is that it is becoming a good life. Here is Aristotle's way of making this point: "Certainly the future is obscure to us, while happiness, we claim, is an end and something in every way final…If so, we shall call happy those among living men in whom these conditions are, and are to be fulfilled."