The “group selection hypothesis” can explain why altruistic behavior still exists in modern societies where it is advantageous to pursue self-interest. According to this hypothesis, groups with more altruistic individuals have an advantage in survival and prosperity, and altruistic tendencies are maintained through institutions and cultural factors.
While many people say that the world has become a harsher place because we can barely afford to feed ourselves, we still witness and perform good deeds every so often. Anonymous envelopes of money in Salvation Army pots, donating blood, helping a friend in need…. These acts that benefit others but are a sacrifice to ourselves are called altruistic. It’s not always easy for us to be altruistic. From an individual’s point of view, it pays to be selfish, no matter what strategy the other person chooses. Nevertheless, there are several hypotheses that explain why we see so many altruistic behaviors in our society, one of which is the group selection hypothesis.
The idea is that the survivability of a group depends on how many people possess a trait, and this determines whether the trait spreads or dies out, a process known as group selection. From a group’s perspective, the more altruistic individuals it has, the more likely it is to succeed. This means that there are more individuals willing to make sacrifices for the good of the group. When a group is at risk from a natural disaster or economic crisis, individuals will go out of their way to help the group recover. This “group selection” runs up against “individual selection” because, from an individual’s perspective, altruism is not an advantageous trait. In theory, individuals with altruistic tendencies should become increasingly rare due to individual selection, just as genes that are better suited to survive survive.
However, competition between groups makes group selection a necessity. Just as individual selection identifies traits that are more likely to survive through competition between individuals, group competition has shown that the more altruistic individuals there are to fight for the group, the more likely the group is to survive. The explanation for why wars have been so frequent in human history can be traced back to our “outsider exclusivity”. In experiments where people were asked to punish a norm deviator by sacrificing their own share, it was found that people were more angry when the norm deviator harmed someone from their own tribe, and even more angry when the norm deviator was from a different tribe. The downside of being exclusionary towards outsiders is that it reduces diversity within the group, so how could this behavior have survived? First, in wars, groups with more altruistic, outsider-hostile individuals are more likely to win, and they can spread this strategy to the losing side, perpetuating the outsider-exclusionary tendency.
Altruistic behavior can also be transmitted through culture and education. For example, if parents teach their children the importance of altruistic behavior and they learn to cooperate and share with their peers at school, altruism can be passed down through generations. This is an example of another aspect of the group selection hypothesis, which suggests that social learning and cultural factors, not just genetic selection, play a role in the persistence of altruistic behavior. If a group develops a culture that encourages and rewards altruistic behavior, the group will become more united and stronger.
Ultimately, the survival of altruism depends on the speed at which collective and individual selection occurs, and many scholars believe that collective selection will be too slow. However, humans have a tool called institutions, which can make collective selection more effective than individual selection. Here’s an example. From an individual perspective, it is more advantageous to be selfish, so selfish people are likely to earn more than altruistic people. However, if an income redistribution policy reduces the income gap between individuals, it may reduce the rate at which individuals with altruistic behavioral strategies disappear. In fact, humans have long since prevented altruistic behavior from disappearing through a strong income redistribution system called food sharing. In the absence of institutions, wars would need to occur 40% of the time per generation to maintain the proportion of people with altruistic strategies around 60%, whereas in the presence of institutions, 25% of the time per generation is sufficient.
In conclusion, the core of the group selection hypothesis is “community maintenance,” and it provides an excellent explanation for how many people are altruistic despite the fact that altruism is disadvantageous in individual selection. It also does not suffer from the limitation that it can only explain a narrow range of altruistic behaviors, like the kin selection hypothesis or the recurrence-reciprocity hypothesis. It is also pointed out that the speed of collective selection is very slow compared to individual selection, but it can be compensated through institutions. It is clear that the collective selection hypothesis holds a large part of the key to unlocking the secrets of altruistic behavior.
