This bleak view of human nature is closely associated with the science writer Richard Dawkins, whose book The Selfish Gene became popular because it fitted so well with and helped to justify the competitive and individualistic ethos of late 20th-century societies.
Like many others, Dawkins justifies his views with reference to the field of evolutionary psychology. This is usually seen as a period of intense competition, when life was a kind of Roman gladiatorial battle in which only the traits that gave people a survival advantage were selected and all others fell by the wayside.
This seems logical. According to some estimates , around 15, years ago, the population of Europe was only 29,, and the population of the whole world was less than half a million.
With such small population densities, it seems unlikely that prehistoric hunter-gatherer groups had to compete against each other or had any need to develop ruthlessness and competitiveness, or to go to war. Indeed, many anthropologists now agree that war is a late development in human history, arising with the first agricultural settlements. One of the striking things about such groups is their egalitarianism. Another unfortunate factor — many find it hard to detect selfishness in themselves.
As a study from Yale psychologists and economists at the University of Zurich found out, selfish people make adaptions to their memories to avoid feeling bad about their egotistical behavior. The research, published on April 29 in the journal Nature Communications , revealed that people tend to remember themselves being better to others than they actually were. Fast-forward a few years from now, and certainly more than a few people will be remembering their actions of today with a very different slant from what actually happened.
At what point does your right not to get infected outweigh the right of another to pursue economic prosperity? How much does my right to survive depend on the good will and cooperation from others? Answering these truthfully, without feeling attacked, can stem the tide of real and perceived selfishness that goes against our better natures and costs us lives and societal degradation.
Exploring Morality and Selfishness in Modern Times. Key Takeaways. Paul Ratner. Studies show that in the first year of life, infants exhibit empathy toward others in distress. At later stages in life we routinely work together to reach goals and help out in times of need. Yet instances of selfish behavior also abound in society. One recent study used a version of the classic Prisoner's Dilemma, which can test people's willingness to set aside selfish interests to reach a greater good.
After modeling different strategies and outcomes, the researchers found that being selfish was more advantageous than cooperating. The benefit may be short-lived, however. Another study showed that players who cooperated did better in the long run. It seems that human nature supports both prosocial and selfish traits. Genetic studies have made some progress toward identifying their biological roots. By comparing identical twins, who share nearly percent of their genes, and fraternal twins, who share about half, researchers have found overwhelming evidence for genetic effects on behaviors such as sharing and empathy.
He published his computer tournament results and proofs of his theoretical propositions. Businesses really did cooperate, extending each other reciprocal credit, until liquidation loomed.
Then trust fell apart, and even old associates vied with each other to see who could file the quickest writs. In a recent survey of the work since the publication of his book, Axelrod wrote that cooperation based on reciprocity had been noted in everything from vampire bats to vervet monkeys to stickleback fish, and that advice based on the theory had been offered for problems in breaches of contract, child custody arrangements, superpower negotiations, and international trade.
The study of cooperation was well established and growing, Axelrod said; cooperative behavior could be taught. For humanists, however, and those scientists who are troubled by the conviction that there is more to human nature than the purely selfish, even this description of cooperation through reciprocity is disappointing. There is no divided loyalty here, no painful choice, just a simple calculation.
Travelers still leave the requisite tip in restaurants in cities to which they will never return. Citizens vote in elections even though they know that their vote is extremely unlikely to make a difference. People help strangers in trouble. They willingly bear costs in the name of fair play. They remain married in situations in which it would clearly pay to cut and run. A highly imaginative approach for dealing with such instances, and for extending economics to the realm of the emotions in general, is proposed in a new book by Robert H.
Frank, a Cornell University professor, spent ten years performing the comparatively humdrum duties of a teacher before going to Washington, D. When he returned to Cornell, a couple of remarkable books tumbled out, sufficient to place Frank on leading lists of the half-dozen most interesting mid-life economists working in the United States today. Choosing the Right Pond: Human Behavior and the Quest for Status is an exploration of status fairly bursting with novel ideas about why people tend to organize themselves into leagues.
It is the kind of book that any reader, perhaps especially readers of this magazine, can pick up and browse with pleasure. Now, with Passions Within Reason, Frank has written a somewhat tighter and more demanding book.
But it is the one that is destined to help change the way we think about the basis of ethical behavior. They exist, he says. We see a homeless person, we are moved to pity; we see a child in danger, we are moved to help; we see a sterling baseball play, we are stirred and excited; we imagine our mate with another person, we burn with jealously and rage; we contemplate stealing from an unattended change box, we blush with shame.
Thinking as an evolutionist, Frank asks, what useful purpose might these feelings serve? The answer he gives is that the highly useful function of the emotions is precisely to short-circuit narrowly self-interested behavior, because honest and helpful people are those whom everyone wants for partners, and because nobody messes with people who get angry when they are crossed.
If you want people to trust you, it helps, not hurts, to blush when you tell a lie. If you want people not to take advantage of you, it helps, not hurts, to be known as someone who will fly into an irrational rage if you are cheated. The self-interest model counsels that opportunists have every reason to break the rules when they think no one is looking. Virtue is not only its own reward here; it may also lead to material rewards in other contexts.
The trick here is that, in order to work, your emotional predisposition must be observable; in order for evolutionary processes to produce the kind of emotionally based, altruistic behavior that interests Frank, cooperators have to be able to recognize each other. Moreover, an emotional commitment must be costly to fake; the Quakers grew rich on the strength of their reputation for honest dealing, partly because it takes just too much time and energy to become a Quaker in order to take advantage of the opportunity to cheat.
Any Quaker you meet is almost bound to be honest. The same principle applies to the rich set of linkages between the brain and the rest of the body, according to Frank.
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