Suchergebnisse
"Terence C. Burnham"
Titel: The Biological and Evolutionary Logic of Human Cooperation
Autor: Terence C. Burnham / Dominic D. P. Johnson
Seite: 113-135
Abstract: Human cooperation is held to be an evolutionary puzzle because people voluntarily engage in costly cooperation, and costly punishment of non-cooperators, even among anonymous strangers they will never meet again. The costs of such cooperation cannot be recovered through kin-selection, reciprocal altruism, indirect reciprocity, or costly signaling. A number of recent authors label this behavior "strong reciprocity", and argue that it is: (a) a newly documented aspect of human nature, (b) adaptive, and (c) evolved by group selection. We argue exactly the opposite; that the phenomenon is: (a) not new, (b) maladaptive, and (c) evolved by individual selection. In our perspective, the apparent puzzle disappears to reveal a biological and evolutionary logic to human cooperation. Group selection may play a role in theory, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain human cooperation. Our alternative solution is simpler, makes fewer assumptions, and is more parsimonious with the empirical data.
Ernst Fehr on Human Altruism. An Interdisciplinary Debate
2005 (27) Heft 1
Editorial
In the foregoing decade, two related developments in the behavioural sciences have drawn the attention of social scientists, particularly economists. The first is the use of laboratory experiments in the investigation of human behaviour. Although the use of such experiments has a longer history, only in the last decade has ’experimental economics’ become a sub-discipline of economics with which economists of just about all colours are familiar; indeed, experimental results regularly feed int...