The origin of altruistic behavior, i.e. the behavior that is useful for a population or a species but goes at the expense of an altruistic individual, has long been a challenge for students of evolutionary biology. The populations with altruistic individuals thrive better than those without altruists; however, the altruists within a population thrive worse than the non-altruists and their preva...

Explaining the evolution and maintenance of cooperation among unrelated individuals is one of the fundamental problems in biology and the social sciences. Recent findings suggest that altruistic punishment is an important mechanism maintaining cooperation among humans. We experimentally explore the boundaries of altruistic punishment to maintain cooperation by varying both the cost and the impa...

Formulation and specification of activity analysis models require better understanding of time allocation behavior that goes beyond the more recent within household analyses to understand selfish and altruistic behavior and how this relates to travel behavior. Using data from 1,471 persons in a recent 2-day time use/ activity diary and latent class cluster analysis we identify 11 distinct daily...

The origin of altruistic behavior has long been a challenge for students of evolutionary biology. The populations with altruistic individuals do better than those without altruists; however, the altruists within a population do worse than the non-altruists and their prevalence in the population decreases due to individual selection. Under certain conditions, the strength of group selection, i.e...

In recent years, kidney paired donation (KPD) has been extended to include living non-directed or altruistic donors, in which an altruistic donor donates to the candidate of an incompatible donor-candidate pair with the understanding that the donor in that pair will further donate to the candidate of a second pair, and so on; such a process continues and thus forms an altruistic donor-initiated...

Compassion is a key motivator of altruistic behavior, but little is known about individuals' capacity to cultivate compassion through training. We examined whether compassion may be systematically trained by testing whether (a) short-term compassion training increases altruistic behavior and (b) individual differences in altruism are associated with training-induced changes in neural responses ...

Altruistic punishment is suggested to explain observed high levels of cooperation among non-kin related humans. However, laboratory experiments as well as ethnographic evidence suggest that people might retaliate if being punished, and that this reduces the level of cooperation. Building on existing models on the evolution of cooperation and altruistic punishment, we explore the consequences of...

Recent research on the notion of altruism in terrestrial life has focused on certain altruistic behaviors, which are regarded as beneficial to animal life, especially with respect to individual animal species. Such findings throw light on individualoriented mechanisms and their evolution in helping to clarify so-called intentional interactions between individuals based on discrimination of othe...

Possible associations of gender, age, and participation in volunteer activities with altruistic behavior of Chinese adolescents were investigated. A representative sample of 1,105 Hong Kong Chinese adolescents (457 boys, 648 girls) were recruited from 20 schools. Results of multiple regression analyses indicated that there was a positive age effect on altruistic behavior. In addition, a positiv...

We study the effect of combining selfishness and altruism in atomic congestion games. We allow players to be partially altruistic and partially selfish and determine the impact of this behavior on the overall system performance. Surprisingly, our results indicate that, in general, by allowing players to be (even partially) altruistic, the overall system performance deteriorates. Instead, for th...