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Related Experiment Video

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Tracking Sugar-Elicited Local Searching Behavior in Drosophila

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Biological evolution and behavioral evolution: two approaches to altruism.

Howard Rachlin¹, Matthew L Locey, Vasiliy Safin

¹Psychology Department, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794-2500, USA. howard.rachlin@sunysb.edu

The Behavioral and Brain Sciences

|March 1, 2013

Summary

Altruism can be learned through behavioral evolution, mirroring biological evolution principles. This involves prioritizing group rewards over individual gains, both socially and temporally, akin to self-control.

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Area of Science:

Behavioral evolution
Social psychology
Evolutionary biology

Background:

Altruism is often explained through biological evolution.
The mechanisms of learned altruism require further exploration.

Purpose of the Study:

To propose a framework for understanding altruism as a learned behavior.
To draw parallels between behavioral and biological evolution of altruism.

Main Methods:

Conceptual analysis comparing altruism across social and temporal dimensions.
Analogy drawn between group reward maximization in social space and self-control in temporal space.

Main Results:

Altruism can be understood as a learned behavior analogous to biological evolution.
The concept of altruism across social space parallels self-control over time.

Conclusions:

Learned altruism involves prioritizing collective or long-term rewards.
Behavioral evolution offers a complementary perspective to biological evolution in explaining altruism.