by: matthew timmins
Background: For social animals, such as humans, prosocial behaviors such as cooperation and child-rearing act as an evolutionary advantage (Davidov, Vaish, Knafo‐Noam, & Hastings, 2016). For example, human infants require caretakers to survive. If humans did not have an innate tendency to engage in prosocial behaviors, we would not be able to reproduce thriving offspring. Further, better cooperation within a group increases the chances of surviving threats from other groups and harsh conditions. Although a parent must give up time and energy to take care of a child and a farmer must share some of their crops, the group received benefits. Within the context of Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT), if no one cooperates, then no one suffers any costs (The RSA, 2011). Comparatively, if everyone cooperates, everyone suffers a cost but may receive a net benefit. EGT suggests that prosocial behavior is motivated by egoism—we will only engage in prosocial behaviors when there is some potential benefit for the self. Such benefits may come directly from the helped individual—immediately or delayed—or the benefits may come from others who have knowledge of the helping behavior. It may also be that we help certain individuals who improve our mood while we avoid those who decrease our mood.
However, some research has examined prosocial behaviors in which the helper does not directly receive any benefit (e.g., Materla & Ryan, 2016). In one study, participants completed a competitive game ostensibly against another participant (Materla & Ryan, 2016). Some participants were informed of the potential to anonymously aid another player (helping condition), while the control group was not aware of the ability to help. Researchers found that participants in the helping condition reported increased feelings of well-being after helping. Further, participants in the helping condition also performed better on a subsequent Stroop task compared to the control group. In contrast to EGT, no one was aware of participants’ helping behavior, and thus, the participants did not directly benefit from prosocial behaviors. One critique may be that participants had previous experience of increased well-being after anonymous prosocial behaviors, which made them more likely to help in this particular study. However, participants were likely unaware of any benefits on the Stroop task performance. Overall, it is reasonable to argue that the benefits of the prosocial behavior did not directly follow EGT because the prosocial behaviors were anonymous and participants may or may not have been aware of the potential benefits from helping. As the participants may have been unaware of any potential self-benefits, these participants may have been motivated by altruism rather than egoism.
Conclusions: Evolutionarily, prosocial behaviors may have developed due to the direct and indirect benefits from helping others, which is consistent with egoistic motivations and EGT. Research supports the notion that we help when we anticipate a positive interaction with the helped individual (e.g., Hauser, Preston, & Stansfield, 2014). However, other research does support the possibility of altruistic helping in which the prosocial behavior appears to only benefit others. Aside from anecdotal evidence from extreme situations (e.g., a soldier falling on a grenade to save his comrades), simple behaviors such as those in Materla and Ryan (2016) suggest that altruism may exist and that not all prosocial behaviors are motivated by egoism.
References
- Davidov, M., Vaish, A., Knafo‐Noam, A., & Hastings, P. D. (2016). The motivational foundations of prosocial behavior from a developmental perspective–evolutionary roots and key psychological mechanisms: Introduction to the special section. Child Development, 87(6), 1655–1667. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12639
- Hauser, D. J., Preston, S. D., & Stansfield, R. B. (2014). Altruism in the wild: When affiliative motives to help positive people overtake empathic motives to help the distressed. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(3), 1295–1305. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035464
- Martin, A., & Olson, K. R. (2015). Beyond Good and Evil. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 159–175. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691615568998
- The RSA. (2011). Supercooperators: The mathematics of evolution, altruism and human behaviour. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3plwTxdSO4&list=PLvHvksROd4A5a_gxTiky_4g7t JayVC-ns&index=2
- University of Richmond. (2010). Empathy Induced Altruism. University of Richmond. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NikU_4ooBQ8&list=PLvHvksROd4A5a_gxTiky_4g7 tJayVC-ns&index=1