Why is parental altruism natural? The communication hypothesis of human altruistic choices

Communication allows people to compromise their self-interest and make altruistic choices. Several experiments have shown that communication facilitates altruistic behavior.

 

You 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, selfish beings who always put their own interests first, this behavior may seem strange. However, it’s actually quite natural for all of us. The “kin selection hypothesis” interprets this altruistic behavior as a way to ensure that your genes are passed on to future generations. Altruistic behavior is seen as something you do for yourself. The hypothesis that explains most altruistic behavior is that we do things for others because they are ultimately good for us. However, this hypothesis fails to account for situations where helping others does nothing for you, such as when people lost in the mountains share the last of their water. This is where the communication hypothesis comes in.
The communication hypothesis posits that just by talking, humans can make altruistic choices that allow them to give up some of their self-interest and give for others. To illustrate this, Juan Camilo Cardenas of the Andean University in Bogotá, Colombia, experimented with a commons game with 65 university students and 40 peasants. A commons is a resource, like pasture, that everyone owns in common, but that others can’t use if someone uses too much of it. Cardenas created experimental conditions that mimicked the commons, based on the following hypothetical situation: He divided the participants into teams of five, and the rules of the game were that each player could harvest a resource from 1 to 8, and at the end of the game, each player would receive a payoff based on a table that determined their payoff based on the sum of the amount of the resource they harvested and the amount of the resource everyone else harvested. The payoff table is set up like a commons, where the more resources you take, the more you get paid, and the less the sum of the resources taken by others, the more you get paid. The game was repeated 20 times for each team, and the amount of resources they harvested was kept secret.
Before looking at the results of this experiment, it is important to note that the only way to increase your payoff is to take more resources, regardless of how many resources others take. Therefore, even though the payoff table shows less payoff when everyone takes 1 resource than when everyone takes 8 resources, you would expect that everyone would take resources closer to 8 than 1 due to self-interest. The actual experimental results were not too different. From there, Cardenas conducted two more similar experiments. In the first experiment, the participants were not allowed to communicate with each other, but in the second experiment, the participants were allowed to communicate with each other. In one experiment, the participants had a discussion about how they should act once every 10 games, and then played the remaining 10 games. In the other experiment, the participants had a discussion after every game, starting from the 10th game out of 20. Of course, in both of these experiments, the results were kept secret.
The results showed that people harvested roughly 4-5 resources when there was no discussion at all. In the other two experiments, people’s resource extraction was 4-5 before the 10th game, but dropped to 2-3 after the discussion, and in the experiment with only one discussion, resource extraction increased as the game went on, but in the experiment with a discussion after every game, resource extraction stayed about the same. We can see here that communication has the effect of making people less likely to trade off individual interests against the good of the group. Cardenas went on to conduct another similar experiment in which he debated whether or not to introduce a fine system, and the results were almost identical to the previous one.
The communication hypothesis suggests that communication alone can lead people to act altruistically rather than selfishly, just like in the commons experiment, where everyone benefits by giving a little rather than getting the most. As we’ve seen, communication is very important, but there is no established theory of how communication leads to altruistic behavior. While there is no established theory of the communication hypothesis, there are several hypotheses. Some of these hypotheses have been debunked many times, and others are very difficult to validate, so the idea that communication leads to altruistic behavior is an ongoing research question. For this reason, some scholars argue that communication is nothing more than “cheap chit-chat,” and in fact, there are many altruistic behaviors that cannot be explained by communication alone. For example, someone who anonymously donates large sums of money to a hospital or a monthly donation to an African refugee they’ve never met is providing free help to someone they have no connection to, without any communication. So while the communication hypothesis is not fully proven, and there are many unexplained phenomena, what we do know is that communication is a non-negligible factor in driving altruistic behavior.