Evolutionary theories on altruism among relatives, friends, and group members are considered as the regular parts of the psychological handbooks by now. However, helping to strangers - which is a unique capacity of human beings - has not satisfactorily been explained in psychological studies linked to the Darwinian framework. Why are we generous towards those who are not our relatives, whom we cannot expect to return, even whom we have not met at all? The author argues that those emotional and cognitive information-processing mechanisms that predispose humans to behave altruistically towards strangers constitute an inherent part of the human psychological equipment. A question arises, how these mechanisms could have been shaped during evolution, given that altruism may impose certain costs and risks on the altruist. Another crucial question is that what specific psychological processes mediate the adaptive algorithms of prosocial behavior to the actual interpersonal relationships. He suggests four behavioral strategies and psychological mechanisms - and the underlying possible evolutionary processes - that may be responsible for shaping altruism towards strangers: 1. Similarity and sympathy (kin selection); 2. Strong reciprocity and altruistic punishment (group selection); 3. Reputation-gaining, costly signaling and competitive altruism (individual selection); 4. Cognitive processes that have been primarily shaped for other, non-altruistic tasks, such as theory of mind, Machiavellianism, empathy (exaptation).
The theory of mind - a capacity of attributing mental states to other individuals - plays a crucial role in social life. On the one hand, it facilitates one's cooperation with group members, and, on the other hand, it makes it possible to manipulate others for achieving one's own purposes. In the recent study an attempt has been made to analyse certain important aspects of the complex relationship between theory of mind and social behaviour. For examining mindreading capacity, subjects were asked to follow short stories, and the level of Machiavellianism and cooperative ability was measured by using various tests. The authors have shown that Machiavellianism is negatively associated with a readiness for cooperation: those persons who are more inclined to manipulate others show a lower degree of cooperation. Second, strong correlation was found between mindreading capacity and cooperative ability. This finding could be interpreted that the better mindreading capacity one has, the higher level of cooperation with others one shows. Finally, no significant association was found between theory of mind and Machiavellianism. This result did not support their assumption that those persons who more easily take the others' perspective and understand their intentions and knowledge, efficiently and successfully manipulate the others. For the discussion of gthe authots' results - especially the third one - the hypothesis of 'cold' and 'hot' empathy, the representation of moral emotions, and other cognitive explanatory models were used.
Everyday experience shows that humans are often altruistic towards unrelated individuals, even strangers in need in the absence of return. Evolutionary psychology has been coping with the problem of how indiscriminative altruism could have been selected for, that are obviously harmful to individual's survival and reproduction. Costly signal theory states that individuals who engage in altruistic acts serve their own interest by reliably demonstrating their qualities underlying the altruistic act that may be useful for the group mates in future social interactions, such as forming friendships, alliance, getting mates. Whereas this explanatory model has been supported by studies in hunter-gatherer communities, very few well-controlled empirical studies have been made in industrial societies. In the present study on behalf of a charity organization 186 students of 12 different seminary groups were asked to offer support to unfamiliar persons in need. In accordance with our predictions, the results show that significantly more subjects are willing to give assistance if they can make their charity offers in the presence of their group mates than in a situation when the offers are kept in secret. The likelihood of charity service was strongly influenced by the expected cost of altruistic behavior: more subjects offered costly assistance in groups in which they could make their offers in public than in the ones where they did not have a chance to do it publicly. Publicly demonstrated altruistic offer yields a long-term benefit: subjects who were willing to participate in a particular charity activity gained significantly higher reputation scores than the others. Costly acts of generosity signaled the altruist's trustworthiness, but did not signal another presumed personality trait of altruists: ability to organize. Contrary to one of our predictions, no difference between sexes was found in reputation-gaining strategy, which needs an explanation.
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