Despite our selfish nature, humans can sometimes choose altruistic behaviour through communication. The Public Goods Game and Tragedy of the Commons experiments have shown that simple conversations and discussions can play an important role in inhibiting individuals’ selfish choices and encouraging cooperative behaviour.
What do we think of when we hear the word ‘wolf’? ‘Full moon’, ‘howling’, or ‘werewolf’ may come to mind, while others may come up with the phrase ‘men are wolves’. If you’re looking for a more academic and historical answer, Hobbes’s ‘Man is a wolf to all men’ might be one of them. In fact, this quote from Hobbes is the most appropriate one to bring up the issue we’re going to talk about today. In his words, the ‘wolf’ represents the selfish nature of human beings: individual humans make the most selfish and rational choices possible in order to maximise their own interests. This makes perfect evolutionary sense, and individuals who act altruistically should have been culled for making irrational choices. Nevertheless, humanity has managed to maintain altruism and social solidarity to this day. Because this phenomenon is not easily explained by biological evolutionary principles alone, social scientists have proposed various hypotheses to explain altruistic behaviour.
As we see all around us today, people still make altruistic choices that benefit others, even at their own expense. There are many hypotheses to answer this question, but in this article, we’ll focus on one of them: the communication hypothesis.
The core of the communication hypothesis is that simple communication between individuals can lead them to act altruistically. In theory, of course, communication has no power. It is in an individual’s best interest to choose to be selfish, whether they communicate or not, and whether the other person chooses to or not. This logic of choice is rooted in human rationality, and most economic models are based on the assumption that individuals will act in their own best interests. However, the results of real-world experiments conducted in this regard are very different from these theoretical expectations.
Let’s start with an experiment by David Sally on the ‘public goods game’. To explain the experiment, let’s take a quick look at the public goods game. When using a public good, the best choice for each individual is to enjoy its benefits without paying for its creation. Of course, it is also possible to pay the costs and enjoy the benefits, but the benefits to each individual will be reduced. As a result, if everyone makes a self-interested choice, the public good will be unavailable to everyone. Sally wanted to test whether communication would make a difference in the aforementioned situation. Surprisingly, people’s co-operation increased significantly when communication was assumed. The amount of money individuals donated to create the public good increased by 40-45 per cent.(Sally, 1995)
Another experiment by Juan Camilo Cardenas was based on the Tragedy of the Commons game to see how communication affects behaviour. As with Sally’s experiment, we’ll talk a little bit about the Tragedy of the Commons to help you understand the experiment. The Tragedy of the Commons game is based on the premise that people share a common resource. If people make selfish choices that waste resources by thinking only about their own interests, they will eventually face the tragedy of resource depletion. However, if people make rules to limit their use of the resource, they can continue to enjoy its benefits, albeit with fewer benefits than if they made selfish choices. In other words, they need to make choices with long-term survival and benefit in mind, rather than short-term gain. Cardenas wondered what impact communication could have under these conditions, so he conducted an experiment using a form of communication called discussion. The results showed that discussion increased the degree of altruistic choice, just as it did in Sally’s experiment. More specifically, when making selfish choices without communication, each person chose to gain A, but after discussion, they chose to gain (1/2)A, which is half as much. In a subsequent experiment, instead of communication, Cardenas allowed each individual to reveal their choice with a certain probability, with rewards and punishments based on the outcome, and the data were very similar to the results of the previous experiment in the presence of communication. This suggests that communication itself acts as a system for detecting and punishing selfish choices.(Juan Camilo Cardenas, 2005)
Sally and Cardenas studied the effects of communication in the context of the Public Goods Game and the Tragedy of the Commons Game, respectively, and both experiments provided experimental support for the Communication Hypothesis, which states that communication leads individuals to behave altruistically. Sally’s work in particular clearly demonstrated that communication processes, such as everyday conversations and discussions, can inhibit our selfish instincts and encourage cooperative behaviour. Social psychologists are still trying to understand how this works, although it’s not yet clear how people change. Despite these limitations, the significance of the communication hypothesis is that it explains something that the repetition-reciprocity hypothesis, the leading theory of altruism, does not. While the repetition-reciprocity hypothesis has difficulty interpreting an individual’s altruistic behaviour if the situation is not repeated, the communication hypothesis shows that altruism can be expressed through communication alone, even in the absence of repetition.
Hobbes’s wolf is certainly a good representation of human selfishness. But just as wolves often communicate through their distinctive howls while making the best selfish choices, so too do humans act altruistically, and the Communication Hypothesis explains that it is our communication, like the wolf’s howl, that allows altruism to survive.
