Session 3

Are we inherently selfish?

Thomas V. Pollet ()

2020-02-14

Last week.

The evolution of cooperation / altruism.

Like last week, I’ll explain some concepts:

Cleaner fish (photo by Richard Ling) Cleaner fish (photo by Richard Ling)

Fehr & Fishbacher paper.

Bateson et al. paper.

Hands-on activity

References

Axelrod, R., & Hamilton, W. (1981). The evolution of cooperation. Science, 211(4489), 1390–1396. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.7466396

Cosmides, L. (1989). The logic of social exchange: Has natural selection shaped how humans reason? Studies with the Wason selection task. Cognition, 31(3), 187–276. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(89)90023-1

Fehr, E., & Fischbacher, U. (2003). The nature of human altruism. Nature, 425(6960), 785–791. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02043

Fehr, E., Fischbacher, U., & Gächter, S. (2002). Strong reciprocity, human cooperation, and the enforcement of social norms. Human Nature, 13(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-002-1012-7

Gardner, A., & West, S. A. (2010). GREENBEARDS. Evolution, 64(1), 25–38. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1558-5646.2009.00842.x

Hamilton, W. (1964). The genetical evolution of social behaviour. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7(1), 1–52. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-5193(64)90038-4

Noë, R., & Hammerstein, P. (1994). Biological markets: supply and demand determine the effect of partner choice in cooperation, mutualism and mating [Article]. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 35(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00167053

Roberts, G. (1998). Competitive altruism: from reciprocity to the handicap principle. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 265(1394), 427–431. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.1998.0312

Trivers, R. L. (1971). The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 46(1), 35. https://doi.org/10.1086/406755