ReviewFrontiers in behavioral neuroscience2015
Why humans might help strangers.
Review in Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- Long-term cooperative relationships among vampire bats are not strongly predicted by their initial interactions.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2024Article
- The restart effect in social dilemmas shows humans are self-interested not altruistic.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Ancestral social environments plus nonlinear benefits can explain cooperation in human societies.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- How resource sharing resists scarcity: the role of cognitive empathy and its neurobiological mechanisms.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2022Article
- Cooperation as a signal of time preferences.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Self-interested learning is more important than fair-minded conditional cooperation in public-goods games.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
- A preference to learn from successful rather than common behaviours in human social dilemmas.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Evaluating mechanisms that could support credible reputations and cooperation: cross-checking and social bonding.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The benefits of being seen to help others: indirect reciprocity and reputation-based partner choice.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Networks of reliable reputations and cooperation: a review.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Decoupling cooperation and punishment in humans shows that punishment is not an altruistic trait.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- No good deed goes unpunished: the social costs of prosocial behaviour.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Review
- Neighbourhood wealth, not urbanicity, predicts prosociality towards strangers.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Punishment: one tool, many uses.Evolutionary human sciences · 2019Review
- Educational attainment is associated with unconditional helping behaviour.Evolutionary human sciences · 2019Article
- Behavioural homogenization with spillovers in a normative domain.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Bonobos respond prosocially toward members of other groups.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Helping in humans and other animals: a fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Review
- Risk buffering and resource access shape valuation of out-group strangers.Scientific reports · 2016Article
- How institutions shaped the last major evolutionary transition to large-scale human societies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans regularly help strangers, even when interactions are apparently unobserved and unlikely to be repeated. Such situations have been simulated in the laboratory using anonymous one-shot games (e.g., prisoner's dilemma) where the payoff matrices used make helping biologically altruistic. As in real-life, participants often cooperate in the lab in these one-shot games with non-relatives, despite that fact that helping is under negative selection under these circumstances. Two broad explanations for such behavior prevail. The "big mistake" or "mismatch" theorists argue that behavior is constrained by psychological mechanisms that evolved predominantly in the context of repeated interactions with known individuals. In contrast, the cultural group selection theorists posit that humans have been selected to cooperate in anonymous one-shot interactions due to strong between-group competition, which creates interdependence among in-group members. We present these two hypotheses before discussing alternative routes by which humans could increase their direct fitness by cooperating with strangers under natural conditions. In doing so, we explain why the standard lab games do not capture real-life in various important aspects. First, asymmetries in the cost of perceptual errors regarding the context of the interaction (one-shot vs. repeated; anonymous vs. public) might have selected for strategies that minimize the chance of making costly behavioral errors. Second, helping strangers might be a successful strategy for identifying other cooperative individuals in the population, where partner choice can turn strangers into interaction partners. Third, in contrast to the assumptions of the prisoner's dilemma model, it is possible that benefits of cooperation follow a non-linear function of investment. Non-linear benefits result in negative frequency dependence even in one-shot games. Finally, in many real-world situations individuals are able to parcel investments such that a one-shot interaction is turned into a repeated game of many decisions.
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