Altruism and Emotions

Altruism and Emotions Herbert Gintis March 17, 2002 Abstract The idea that altruism requires self-control makes sense only if people consider altruistic acts as moral duties the present cost of which will only be recouped in the future. By contrast, I shall present evidence that altruism is dictated by emotions, not reasoned self-control: people secure an immediate payoff from performing altruistic acts, so no element of self-control is present. In most social species, cooperation is facilitated by a high level of relatedness of conspecifics. Human groups, however, sustain a high level of cooperation despite a low level of relatedness among members. Three approaches have been offered to explain this phenomenon: long-run self-interest, in the form of reciprocal altruism (Trivers 1971, Axelrod and Hamilton 1981), cultural group selection for prosocial traits, (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981, Boyd and Richerson 1985) and genetically-based altruism (Lumsden and Wilson 1981, Simon 1993, Sober and Wilson 1998). Rachlin’s account falls under the second category, since he con- siders altruism as non-self-interested, and learned as opposed to flowing from an internal (i.e., genetic) mechanism. Rachlin argues that the habitual practice of helping others at a cost to oneself leads to a “happier mode of existence” than habitual selfishness, but conformance to a norm of altruism involves self-control, since the pleasures of selfishness are immediate, whereas the returns to altruism manifest themselves only over long periods of time. Having reviewed the moral precepts of most of the world’s great religions, I can attest that this attitude towards altruism is characteristic of most theological writings. The assertion of a deep harmony between the happy life, the ethical life, and the prosocial life, is practically a religious universal. Moreover, if it were true, most of the problems involved in explaining the emergence and sustenance of altruism in society would disappear: the “costs” of helping others would fall short of the benefits, and altruism would be a fitness-enhancing, as well as long-run welfare-enhancing behavior. 1 I want to explore one problem with Rachlin’s analysis. The idea that altruism requires self-control makes sense only if people consider altruistic acts as moral duties the present cost of which will only be recouped in the future. By contrast, I shall present evidence that altruism is dictated by emotions, not reasoned self- control: people secure an immediate payoff from performing altruistic acts, so no element of self-control is present. The emotional basis of altruism lies in our possessing certain prosocial emotions, including empathy, shame, and guilt. As Adam Smith long ago noted in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), people become uncomfortable when con- fronted the dis-ease of others, and most will expend some effort to correct the source of dis-ease. People save babies from fires, then, because they empathize with the plight of the infant and pity the distress of its parents, not because they believe that altruism has a long-run personal benefit. Moreover, people would feel ashamed if discovered in the cowardly act of ignoring the baby’s plight, and even were no observers present, many would engage in the altruisticact in order to avoid the guilt they would carry with them knowing the selfishness of their behavior. Rachlin treats doing good deeds as unpleasant duties that bring future rewards in knowing one has had a life well lived. Experimental evidence, by contrast, in- dicates that personally costly prosocial acts are motivated by immediate emotional satisfaction. Consider the following public goods experiment, reported by Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter in Nature (2002). A total of 240 subject participated in a public goods game, payoffs being real money (we’ll call the money Monetary Units, or MU’s for short). Subjects were assigned to four-person groups, and each was given 20MU’s. Each was permitted to contribute (anonymously) some, none, or all of this to a ‘group project’ that gave a return of 0.4MU’s to each member of the four-member group, for each MU contributed. Note that if each member acted selfishly, each would end up with 20MU’s. If all acted altruistically, however, each would contribute 20MU’s to the group project, so each would receive 0:4 80 D 32MU’s. However, no matter what the others do, each receives the highest payoff by contributing nothing. For instance, if three players contribute everything and the fourth nothing, the three earn 0:4 60 D 24MU’s, while the selfish non-contributor earns 0:4 60 C 20 D 44MU’s. Subjects made their investment decisions anonymously and simultaneously, and one these decisions were made, each was informed about the investment decisions of the other three players in the group. Subjects were then allowed to ‘punish’ other group members by assigning between zero and ten points to the punished member. Each point cost the punisher 1MU and the punishee 3MU. All punishment decisions were made simultaneously. This game was repeated six times for each subject, but group membership was changed after each trial period, to eliminate the possibility that punishment could 2 be self-interested by inducing partners to increase their contributions in future periods. The public goods game is an excellent model of cooperation in human society because it involves cooperation among several people, the group gains from the cooperation of its members, yet each member has an incentive to free-ride on the effort of the others. Cooperation is thus an altruistic act. If we add the possibility of punishment, and if enough people are public-spirited and actually punish free-riders, even selfish types will cooperate, so cooperation is no longer altruistic. But now punishing free riders is an altruistic act—personally costly, but group- beneficial because it induces others to contributed. Fehr and Gächeter found that, if punishment is not allowed, the level of cooperation in the first period was about 50% (people invested about half of their 20MU’s), but cooperation deteriorated steadily, until at round six, cooperation was only 10%. However, when punishment was allowed, cooperation was 60% in the first period, and rose to about 75% in later periods. Clearly, altruistic punishment allowed cooperation to be sustained in this public goods game. According to Rachlin, altruistic punishers should have felt it costly to punish, but punished anyway because they had a high level of self-control and perceived the long-run personal gains of behaving morally. In fact, however, subjects felt anger directed towards the free-riders, and punished to achieve the immediate emotional reward of venting this anger on an appropriate individual. Fehr and Gächter ascertained this fact by post-game interviews with subjects, in which players’ mo- tivations were elicited through questionnaires. References Axelrod, Robert and William D. Hamilton, “The Evolution of Cooperation,” Sci- ence 211 (1981):1390–1396. Boyd, Robert and Peter J. Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca and Marcus W. Feldman, Cultural Transmission and Evolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). Fehr, Ernst and Simon Gächter, “Altruistic Punishment in Humans,” Nature 415 (10 January 2002):137–140. Lumsden, Charles J. and Edward O. Wilson, Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Co- evolutionary Process (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). 3 Simon, Herbert A., “Altruism and Economics,” American Economic Review 83,2 (May 1993):156–61. Sober, Elliot and David Sloan Wilson, Unto Others: The Evolutionand Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). Trivers, Robert L., “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,” Quarterly Review of Biology 46 (1971):35–57. enPapersnEvolution of Cooperationnbbs-rachlin commentary.tex January 5, 2017 4.

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