This article focuses on the iteration-reciprocity hypothesis to explain human altruism, but also points out its limitations, including the example of a young man who lost his life trying to save a stranger on the subway.
According to evolutionary theory, organisms act in their own self-interest. However, if you look around you, you’ll often see people exhibiting altruistic behavior, helping others at their own risk. A lot of research has been done to find out what causes this behavior, which is not explained by the usual evolutionary theory. As a result, there are several hypotheses that have been proposed. These include the kin selection hypothesis, which states that people perform altruistic acts for the sake of preserving their own species, the repetition-reciprocity hypothesis, which explains altruistic behavior in repeated encounters, and the signaling hypothesis, which states that people show off their abilities by performing altruistic acts. We’ll focus on the repetition-reciprocity hypothesis.
We’ve all heard the phrases “what goes around comes around” and “you reap what you sow”. These phrases literally mean that I will do the same for you as you do for me. This is the idea behind the repetition-reciprocity hypothesis, one of the most popular hypotheses about why humans exhibit altruistic behavior. The idea is that altruistic behavior doesn’t just happen, it comes from the idea that if you help me, I’ll help you, and if you don’t help me, I won’t help you. It may seem really simple in some ways. However, we see altruistic behavior all around us that stems from this simple principle.
Some people think that friendship is about giving and receiving unconditionally, but on your friend’s birthday, you give him a gift because you expect to receive a gift on your own birthday. Or if it’s your turn to clean the house and you can’t do it, you ask your friend to swap turns with you, promising to do it next time, and he does. These are all examples of altruistic behavior.
However, there is one condition to consider. This is the continuity of the relationship. In the cleaning example above, who is more likely to do a favor for a classmate who will still be around the next day, or a friend who is likely to transfer to another school nearby? We would be more likely to accept a favor from a friend who is transferring to another school nearby than from a friend who is not likely to help. Also, business owners are more likely to give a little more profit to a regular customer than to a casual customer, even if it means losing a little money themselves. This is because they know that the customer will come back to their store and buy from them again, so it is more profitable for them to give a little more to the customer when they see the overall profit than to lose a little and have the customer leave. In other words, an important condition for altruistic behavior is how long the relationship will last.
This explains why the repetition-reciprocity hypothesis is a repetition-reciprocity hypothesis. The repetition-reciprocity hypothesis is based on the idea that the amount of repetition in a relationship or transaction with the giver of an altruistic behavior determines the degree to which the reciprocity of helping and not helping will occur. The repetition-reciprocity hypothesis explains a lot more about altruism than just this example. In a relationship with someone who is likely to be repeatedly encountered, a person acts altruistically because it is a loss in the moment but a gain in the aggregate, including future relationships.
However, the story of a young man who lost his life trying to save a person who fell down the platform in a subway station, or giving up his seat to an elderly person on a bus or subway, is not based on the expectation that the relationship will continue and that he will be rewarded. In other words, there are altruistic behaviors that cannot be explained by this hypothesis. For this reason, the repetition-reciprocity hypothesis is not accepted as the only theory to explain altruistic behavior.
There are other theories of altruism, and not all of them can fully explain the complexity of human behavior. It’s interesting to note that while there are multiple theories for understanding altruistic behavior, no one theory can explain everything. Given the diversity and complexity of human behavior, it’s important to understand the pieces that each theory explains. In the end, altruistic behavior is probably the result of a combination of factors.
As such, understanding altruistic behavior is not just a theory or hypothesis, but an important topic that needs to be analyzed and studied from a variety of perspectives. Research will continue to be conducted in the future to further understand the nature of human behavior.
