Showing posts with label Altruism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Altruism. Show all posts

Can I Give You A Hand?


Many studies have been done that show how one member of a species reacts to another of the same species and these indicate that many species show empathy or, in some cases, altruism. Of course these are all social animals, so it doesn’t seem very surprising that a member of a group would be well aware of what its colleagues are up too.

Cooperation and awareness are key requirements of a social group that benefits from being in a group over and above being a smaller part of the general target for predators. However, aiding a colleague with no expectation other than they may be paying it forward, so to speak is indicative of a sophisticated cognitive process that is worthy of study.

Yamamoto et al studied mother chimpanzees and their offspring helping each other on request and wrote up the work for this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (1). With this experiment, mother and offspring were in different rooms with a pass through. In one room was a drink that needed a straw to get at the fruit juice. The other room had a selection of seven different ‘tools,’ one of which was a straw.

The chimps with the tools were good at finding the straw and handing it over when requested. However when the drink was hidden from the tool stockiest, they tended to hand out the wrong tool. A walking stick was a favorite, but it wouldn't help with drinking juice.

The general conclusions from the study were that chimpanzees will help when requested, but only when requested. They are quite happy to watch the other struggle if not asked to help. Maybe that’s not that surprising when we remember how closely our DNA tells us we are related.

However, like us, when asked they will often step up to the plate and hand out tools. Unfortunately, they don’t have our language skills and the helper has to see what the problem is if they are going to be of any use.

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/01/30/1108517109.full.pdf



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Band Of Brothers?


Altruistic behavior (eusociality) gave Darwin reason to tug at his beard when penning his survival of the fittest concept as the there didn’t seem to be much benefit to altruistic behavior as a common occurrence. When we look across species, it is pretty common.

The cost/benefit analysis was put into nice a nice mathematical expression by Hamilton as
rb-c > 0  where c = cost, b = benefit and r is relatedness.
So this means for a sibling r = ½, for a cousin r = ⅛. The consequence is that your altruism grows with closeness of kinship. This seems to work with computer simulations with hungry robots and some insect colonies. Many students diligently take note of this and include it in their term papers.

            However, all is not quiet and cozy in the recent literature. Nowak et al are strong proponents of using group formation and benefit rather than familial ties as the basis (1). Our armies for example work hard to establish a strong esprit de corps from unrelated people rather than trying to recruit extended families.

            A staunch defense of the original Hamiltonian has been launched by Bourke who defends family ties to the last man standing (2). Again, insects, ants in particular, feature strongly.

As we stand on the sidelines while this ding-dong worthy of Tweedledum and Tweedledee is raging, a curve ball has been tossed into the mix. Kurzban et al have pushed Kant forward to face off with Hamilton (3). So how does nepotistic altruism stack up against Kant’s concept of moral rules derived from common sense ideas of maximizing welfare?

This of course, had to be tested and Kurzban et al set 1290 people the problem of killing one person to save five others. (Note: other options such as waterboarding weren’t a choice.) The relationship of the sacrificial lamb to the test person was varied and their willingness to save the five was recorded.

The results? Are you sure you want them? The researchers found that the participants were more willing to ice a brother or a friend than a stranger to save the five. Clearly, the moral cognition of the 1290 isn’t explained by family ties, or reciprocity, so where does that leave us?

Carrying a big stick, perhaps? I am left with one question: what would a Bonobo do?

  1. M.A. Nowak, C.E. Tarnita & E.O. Wilson, Nature, 1057, 466, (20210).
  2. A.F.G. Bourke, Proc. Roy. Soc. B, (2011) doi: 10.1098/rspb2011.1465
  3. R. Kurzban, P. DeScioli & D. Fein, J. Evolution & Human Behavior http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138(11)00117-6/abstract



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Starting Young


People, in general, tend to be cooperative creatures and that is one of the major reasons for our success in the big scheme of things. The received wisdom is that traits such as fairness, altruism, and empathy make high levels of cooperation possible.

An interesting question is when do these traits become apparent? Do we have to be well into our childhood before we play fair? Well, some researchers have suggested this, but Schmidt and Sommerville have the results of a new study that suggests that this is not the case (1). These workers studied the responses of forty-seven 15-month old girls and boys to two basic situations.

The toddlers watched some videos where two people requested cookies or milk from a third person. In some cases the handouts were equal and in some they were clearly unequal. The young observers stared significantly longer at either the unfair division video picture or the fair division one, indicating their expected result. If an unfair division wasn’t what they expected from an adult, they stared longer – it was in violation of their expectation, VOE.

The next experimental set was designed to test their altruism. After being allowed to play with two toys and showing a preference for one, they were asked by an unfamiliar observer if they could have one. Here we have an interesting result. 32% of the toddlers ignored the request, 37% handed over their least preferred toy, while 32% handed over their preferred toy. These latter toddlers were classified as “altruistic sharers” as opposed to “selfish sharers” (the 37%) or “non-responders”.

Now the analysis becomes more interesting when the VOE preferences are tied in with the sharing behaviors. Our altruistic sharers were very heavily in the group staring in disbelief at the unfair cookie handout, while our selfish sharers were equally heavily glaring at the fair division. The non-responders had VOE preferences split between the two, but they weren’t interested in sharing with strangers anyway.

So what are we going to make of all this? Firstly Schmidt and Sommerville point out that altruism and fairness are already there at 15-months. But wouldn’t it be interesting to fast forward 50 years and see which ones had become lawyers, politicians, or aid workers?

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0023223

Prosocialism


For a long time now, chimpanzees have been getting a bad rap. On the one hand we recognize that DNA-wise they are our closest match in the animal world, but our treatment of them has left a lot to be desired. At one time we had them on the stage as youngsters having a tea party while being dressed up as human kids. We have even worked at teaching them to understand what we’re saying with well known characters like Washo.

More recently we have TV documentaries showing them as non-cuddly, sometimes predatory thug-like characters who could be modeling themselves on Puzo’s Godfather character.

At the same time, we recognize that humans have a strong prosocial or altruistic  streak and we give generously (perhaps) to others who have suffered in a natural disaster. We’re less eager if it’s our fellow citizens in terms of regularizing that altruism via our government, especially if we are having our own regular tea parties, but we agree that monkeys, such as macaques, behave with a marked degree of altruism.

The received wisdom is that chimpanzees don’t. A recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science by Horner et al from Emory U has at last shed doubt on that notion (1).  They indicate that the previous testing methods are probably the reason that great notion was flawed.

The recent study was done with 7 female chimpanzees and they had to choose a token for treats. The choice was between two tokens of different color. One color provided one helping of treats, while the other color provided two helpings so that the other chimp in the room could indulge too.

The chimp girls showed a propensity for going for the two-helping token so they could share with their cell-mate. Interestingly though, if they were bunking with a greedy, whiney cell-mate, they went for the single treat token and had to be pleaded with and pestered to go for double treats.

 So maybe, just maybe, that 2% DNA difference is smaller than we thought.

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/08/01/1111088108.abstract