Competition hinders the evolution of altruism amongst kin when beneficiaries gain at the expense of competing relatives. Altruism is consequently deemed to require stronger kin selection, or trait-selected synergies, or elastic population regulation, to counter this effect. Here we contest the view that competition puts any such demands on altruism. In ecologically realistic scenarios, competit...

Although ego depletion effects have been widely observed in experiments in which participants perform consecutive self-control tasks, the process of ego depletion remains poorly understood. Using the strength model of self-control, we hypothesized that chronic ego depletion adversely affects goal adherence and that mental effort and motivation are involved in the process of ego depletion. In th...

Since Nagel is concerned with altruism, which is a moral motive, his work.Thomas Nagels The Possibility of Altruism is a searching and provocative. Altruism is a rational requirement on action 3, by which he appears to mean that.Thomas Nagels contribution to philosophy over the past forty years has been enormously influential. In this book, the first sustained examination of Nagels.PHIL 5983: A...

Self-affirmation is known to reduce defensive psychological responses to ego threats. The current experiment tested the hypothesis that self-affirmation reduces physiological responses to a form of ego threat-interpersonal evaluation. Participants wrote an essay and received either neutral or insulting evaluative feedback about their essay, ostensibly from another participant. Then participants...

Altruism is a malleable notion that is understood differently in various disciplines. The common denominator of most definitions of altruism is the idea of unidirectional helping behaviour. However, a closer examination reveals that the term altruism sometimes refers to the outcomes of a helping behaviour for the agent and its neighbours – that is, reproductive altruism – and sometimes to what ...

The paper defines altruism as charity. The second section of the paper criticizes three rationalistic (what is called ‘‘interactional’’) theories of altruism, viz., the egoistic, egocentric, and altercentric perspectives. The third section criticizes three normative (what is named ‘‘selfactional’’) theories of altruism, viz., the Kantian, the socialization argument, and ‘‘warm glow’’ story. The...

Inclusive fitness theory predicts that natural selection will favour altruist genes that are more accurate in targeting altruism only to copies of themselves. In this paper, we provide evidence from digital evolution in support of this prediction by competing multiple altruist-targeting mechanisms that vary in their accuracy in determining whether a potential target for altruism carries a copy ...

In a review of the literature on the ego-ideal my impression has been that this concept has been placed in the position of a stepchild of the structural model of the mind, falling somewhere between the ego and the super-ego, and yet remaining loosely linked to both. Authors such as Jacobson (1954), Hartmann and Lowenstein (1962), Sandler (1963), and Schafer (196 7), have regarded the ego-ideal ...

This paper explores how commonly held folk psychology beliefs about selfishness and altruism have framed theoretical accounts of whether, or how, altruism could have evolved. This is demonstrated by assuming an alternative view of selfishness and altruism (from the Tibetan/Buddhist culture) and showing that it results in a very different, but completely plausible account of altruism and selfish...

Cognitive research on metaphoric concepts of time has focused on differences between moving Ego and moving time models, but even more basic is the contrast between Ego- and temporal-reference-point models. Dynamic models appear to be quasi-universal cross-culturally, as does the generalization that in Ego-reference-point models, FUTURE IS IN FRONT OF EGO and PAST IS IN BACK OF EGO. The Aymara l...