Why do people donate blood? Altruism is the common answer. However, altruism is a complex construct and to answer this question requires a systematic analysis of the insights from the biology, economics and psychology of altruism. I term this the mechanism of altruism (MOA) approach and apply it here for understanding blood donor motivation. The answer also has enormous implications for the typ...

There are three prominent solutions to the Darwinian problem of altruism, kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and trait group selection. Only one, reciprocal altruism, most commonly implemented in game theory as a TIT FOR TAT strategy, is not based on the principle of conditional association. On the contrary, TIT FOR TAT implements conditional altruism in the context of unconditionally determin...

The evolution of altruism and reciprocity has been explained mainly from ultimate perspectives. However, in order to understand from a proximate perspective how humans evolved to be such cooperative animals, comparative studies with our evolutionary relatives are essential. Here we review several recent experimental studies on chimpanzees’ altruism and reciprocity. These studies have generated ...

“Group selection” is often cited as an explanation for the survival of altruism. The idea of group selection is a controversial one — much effort has been expended on its justification (and refutation). Relatively little effort has gone into formally testing whether or not it can actually provide a reasonable explanation for altruistic behaviour. This paper concentrates solely on whether or not...

Masses of experiments have shown individual preference for fairness which seems irrational. The reason behind it remains a focus for research. The effect of spite (individuals are only concerned with their own relative standing) on the evolution of fairness has attracted increasing attention from experiments, but only has been implicitly studied in one evolutionary model. The model did not invo...

Previous research on political orientations, which can be understood as one’s leftversus right-wing attitude, has shown that some personality factors yield explanatory power. In the current work, we consider the role of altruism – a personality construct which does not exclusively map onto one of the broad personality dimensions typically studied. Altruism was predicted to relate to left-wing a...

The weak selection approximation of population genetics has made possible the analysis of social evolution under a considerable variety of biological scenarios. Despite its extensive usage, the accuracy of weak selection in predicting the emergence of altruism under limited dispersal when selection intensity increases remains unclear. Here, we derive the condition for the spread of an altruisti...

Two sources of workers’pro-social motivation have been considered in the literature: actionoriented altruism and output-oriented altruism. This paper presents evidence from a …eld experiment, which aims to identify and quantify them. The idea behind our experimental design is to measure in a precise way the level of e¤ort exerted in an environment that elicits purely sel…sh behavior and compare...

Smallholder farmers rely on labor exchange to generate agricultural work when cash is rare and credit unavailable. Reciprocal altruism, biased by genetic kinship, has been implicated as the mechanism responsible for labor exchange; however, few empirical tests confirm this proposition. Competitive altruism could be operating if people differ in ability and use this information as a criterion fo...