While altruistic behavior in humans has been explained by kin selection, the communication hypothesis argues that conversation fosters altruistic decisions by creating a sense of solidarity. The commons experiment at the University of the Andes is an example of how conversation leads to resource conservation, demonstrating why humans go beyond instinct to help others.
We don’t have to look far to find examples of people who live their lives for others rather than themselves, and most parents are likely to be among them. If we think of humans as rational beings who instinctively put their own interests first, this behavior may seem strange. But the truth is, we all find this behavior very natural. Not only parents, but also firefighters who save others in emergencies, healthcare workers who work around the clock in hospitals, or volunteers who work to help the less fortunate, put their own interests aside to serve others. These altruistic behaviors create social bonds and motivate us to be willing to go the extra mile for others, and we are moved by them and sometimes reminded of the value of life.
One of the many hypotheses to explain this altruistic behavior is the kin selection hypothesis. This hypothesis interprets altruistic behavior from the perspective that caring for children who carry one’s genes is a survival strategy to eventually pass on one’s genes to future generations. In other words, parental commitment can be understood as a way to continue one’s own genetic lineage. By this logic, altruistic behavior is ultimately interpreted as being for one’s own good. Similarly, the reciprocal altruism hypothesis explains altruistic behavior by the expectation that the person you help will likely be helped in the future. As a result, the hypotheses that explain most altruistic behavior take the view that doing good for others is possible because it ultimately benefits oneself.
However, this hypothesis fails to account for situations in which helping others provides no physical benefit to oneself, such as when people lost in the mountains share their limited water supply, or when people help each other in moments of desperation. Such extreme altruistic behavior leaves us with a question. One hypothesis that explains this situation is the communication hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, by simply exchanging thoughts and communicating intentions through conversation, humans are able to set aside their own self-interest and make decisions to give for others. The communication hypothesis shows how important human social nature and emotional exchange is.
A study to prove the communication hypothesis is the commons game experiment led by Professor Juan Camilo Cardenas of the Andean University in Bogotá, Colombia. A commons is a resource, such as pasture, that is owned by everyone in common, but if someone overuses it, it becomes unavailable to others. Prof. Cardenas conducted a commons-like experiment with 65 university students and 40 farmers, dividing them into teams of five and creating a hypothetical situation. In this experiment, each participant could harvest resources, and the more they harvested, the more they would be paid, but the less the team as a whole would have, to the disadvantage of others. The choice to use these resources created a dilemma: do you take more resources for personal gain or do you choose to conserve resources for the good of the whole?
Before seeing the results of the experiment, it was clear that it is beneficial to take more resources to maximize one’s payoff, regardless of how much others are taking. However, in the actual experiment, participants took fewer resources than expected. Cardenas then designed two additional experiments to see how communication affects altruistic behavior. In the first experiment, participants were not allowed to communicate at all, and in the second, they were allowed to share their thoughts with each other in a conversation either halfway through or after each game.
In the experiments where communication was possible, teams agreed to use resources sparingly, and resource harvesting was significantly reduced. This suggests that humans have the ability to communicate with others for the benefit of the community. These results suggest that conversation is more than just a means of communication between individuals; it can be an important factor in driving altruistic behavior.
These experiments show that the communication hypothesis can have important implications for human altruistic choices. However, not all altruistic behavior is driven by communication. For example, people who anonymously donate large sums of money to hospitals, or who donate a certain amount of money each month to African refugees they don’t know at all, engage in altruistic behavior without going through a process of communication. In this respect, some scholars question the communication hypothesis, sometimes dismissing it as nothing more than “cheap chatter”. Nevertheless, it’s hard to deny that communication is an important means of creating a sense of solidarity with others in many cases, and enabling individuals to moderate their selfish desires in favor of the collective good.
We have seen in the commons experiment that communication can act as a trigger for altruistic behavior. People make altruistic decisions through interactions with others, even if it’s just a verbal promise, which in turn can contribute to the stability and sustainability of the whole society.
