Don't Be a Stranger - Boston.com - 1 views
articles.boston.com/...ion-evolutionary-psychologists
kindness cooperation research results evolution psychology
![](/images/link.gif)
-
In experiments with total strangers to whom they're unrelated, and whom they'll never see again, people are often surprisingly (and, from a theoretical point-of-view, needlessly) generous, cooperative, and unwilling to cheat.
-
Why should this be? There have been lots of explanations (naive, optimistic undergrads? a culture of friendliness and charity?), but none of them seem to provide the sort of long-term, structured pressures that might explain our friendliness evolutionarily.
-
Essentially, it's that every social encounter between two people involves a guess about whether or not you'll meet again in the future; you have to decide whether or not an interaction will be "one-shot" or "repeated." By modeling "one-shot discrimination" in a computer, the group has shown that it makes more sense to presume that you'll meet again down the road.
- ...2 more annotations...
-
Tooby and Cosmides ran their simulation for tens of thousands of generations, to figure out where the generosity thermostat would get set. They find that it makes more sense to adopt a general attitude of generosity, in the hope that paying it forward now will pay back later. What does this all mean for how we think about ourselves? To the researchers, it suggests that "human generosity, far from being a thin veneer of cultural conditioning atop a Machiavellian core, may turn out to be a bedrock feature of human nature." Why? Because thousands of years of small-town living have left their mark.
-
Why would you choose to cooperate or cheat? The answer hinges, essentially, on a guess: For many encounters, you simply can't know whether or not they'll be one-shot or repeated.