Altruistic behavior seems unlikely to survive from an evolutionary perspective because of its individual detrimental nature. However, certain social structures, particularly the tendency to cluster with like-minded people, create an environment in which altruistic behavior can thrive. Mutual benefit is made possible through cooperation, making altruistic behavior a long-term advantageous strategy within these groups.
In our human society, we often see people engaging in cooperative behavior. Altruistic behavior is also found in animals, including ants, bees, meerkats, vampire bats, and chimpanzees. Altruistic behavior is defined as the act of helping another person at the expense of oneself, which means that the individual is at a loss, but who in their right mind would intentionally put themselves in a situation where they would lose?
Intuitively, it’s easy to see that altruistic behavior is unlikely to exist. One logical model that illustrates this is the Prisoner’s Dilemma game. Two people are arrested as suspects in a crime, and the police can only solve the case if they confess. After taking them to different interrogation rooms, the police offer them the conditions of their confession. If they both confess, they will each be sentenced to five years in prison, and if they both deny the crime until the end, they will be sentenced to one year. On the other hand, if one confesses and the other denies the crime, the confessor is released and the denier is sentenced to seven years in prison. From the perspective of both men, confessing is the best strategy, but in reality, the best situation (one year each) is when neither confesses. This is where the name “prisoner’s dilemma” comes from: altruistic or cooperative behavior is never a good strategy for an individual, which begs the question of how altruistic behavior can exist in society.
Let’s illustrate this problem with the “like-mindedness phenomenon”: if we create a new game in which altruistic and selfish behaviors are interacting, each altruistic person who meets another altruistic person will get 1 payoff. This is called cooperation. On the other hand, if an altruistic person and a selfish person meet, the altruistic person gets -1 and the selfish person gets -2 payoffs. Define this as betrayal (the result of the selfish person’s betrayal). Then, if we construct a trading game where the payoffs are set to zero when selfish people meet, we can see that, like the prisoner’s dilemma, altruism is never a good strategy, and betrayal is the best strategy.
Using this game as a basis, let’s look at how altruistic behavior can exist. If traders use either cooperation or betrayal as a strategy, eventually, those who choose betrayal will gain an advantage over those who choose cooperation. This puts those who choose cooperation in a difficult position to survive. However, when traders who choose to cooperate trade with each other, they can earn a higher payoff than when they trade with traders who choose to betray. Since the betrayal strategy is only profitable when the other party cooperates, a group of altruistic people interacting together will create an environment that favors altruism. This clustering of altruistic people may explain why altruistic behavior is so prevalent in society.
Based on research by sociologists and biologists, Jared Diamond has found that when people choose a mate, they tend to choose someone with similar religious or political views to their own. He says we consider religion and political views as important factors when choosing a mate or making friends. Whether a person is altruistic or selfish is a cultural and behavioral trait, and from Diamond’s research, we can deduce that the phenomenon of people clustering around similar people is understandable. When people grow up in the same cultural background, they can gauge the other person’s disposition to some extent through their tone of voice, facial expressions, and behavior. If we can determine whether the other person is altruistic or selfish before doing business with them, it is likely that altruistic people will eventually seek out similarly altruistic people to do business with, resulting in a clustering of similar people. This would allow altruistic people to survive and be found in society.
However, the phrase “like-mindedness” is often used in a negative way, as in “cliquishness,” and is often interpreted with a critical nuance. The more often similar people cluster together, the more altruistic they become, and while this can have a positive impact on society, it can also reduce the benefits of diversity. Of course, heterogeneity due to selfishness is less likely to result in positive diversity, but it’s easy to understand the negative side of this phenomenon if you imagine a village where all the residents are good people. For example, they might not come up with the idea of inventing machines to make their jobs easier.
So far, we’ve explained how altruistic behavior has survived despite being considered evolutionarily unstable, through the “like-mindedness” phenomenon of altruistic people. In the game above, altruistic behavior is not the best strategy for an individual when trading with selfish behavior, but when trading with similar people, altruistic behavior becomes a sufficiently advantageous strategy that it can thrive. Altruistic people thrive in society because there are enough similar people that this phenomenon can occur. While there may be downsides to having altruistic people thrive in society, society is large and altruistic people are diverse enough that this shouldn’t cause too many problems. Furthermore, if this clustering of similar people leads to more altruistic people and everyone is helping each other, it could create a situation where transactions with cooperative strategies, like the game described above, are beneficial to everyone.
