Humans are selfish, so why do we act altruistically?

In this blog post, I’m going to explain the existence of altruistic behavior in humans through the phenomenon of “like-mindedness”.

 

In our human society, we often see people engaging in cooperative behaviors. Altruistic behavior can also be found in animals such as ants, bees, meerkats, vampire bats, and chimpanzees. Altruistic behavior is defined as the act of helping others at the expense of oneself, which means that the individual is at a loss, but why would anyone rationally create a situation where they are at a loss?
Intuitively, it’s easy to see that altruistic behavior is hard to come by. There is a game that can logically illustrate this, called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Two people are arrested by the police as suspects in a crime, and the police need a confession to charge them with the crime. The police take the two suspects to two different interrogation rooms and make them an offer. If they both confess to committing the crime, they will each be sentenced to five years in prison, and if they both deny the crime to the end, they will each be sentenced to one year in prison. If one confesses and the other denies the crime until the end, the confessor is released and the denier is sentenced to seven years in prison. If you think about the best strategy for both of them, the best strategy is to confess. However, if neither confesses, it is clear that the best situation for both of them is to serve only one year in prison. This is known as the prisoner’s dilemma: altruistic and cooperative behavior is never a good strategy for an individual, and yet it begs the question of how altruistic behavior can exist. The phenomenon of “like-mindedness” is one way to explain this.
Consider a new game in which altruistic and selfish behaviors are traded, and each can get a payoff of 1 if they meet. This is called cooperation. But suppose that when an altruistic actor and a selfish actor meet, the altruistic actor gets -1 and the selfish actor gets -2. This is called betrayal (betrayal by the selfish trader). And if we create a trading game where each selfish and selfish player gets a payoff of 0, then in this model, like the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, selflessness is never a good strategy. Instead, we see that betrayal is the best strategy.
Using this game to explain how altruistic behavior can exist, we can see that if traders choose to cooperate or betray, then those who choose to betray will have an advantage over those who choose to cooperate. After all, there is no way for the cooperative traders to survive. However, we can see that traders who choose to cooperate can be paid more than traders who choose to betray. And we can find that the betrayal strategy can only earn a high rate of return if the other party uses the cooperation strategy, so if cooperative people tend to cluster and interact with altruistic people and not interact with selfish people, it would be a good environment for altruistic people to survive. If altruistic people are able to cluster with similar people, they can thrive in society and explain why altruistic behaviors are observed in society.
Drawing on research from sociologists and biologists, Jared Diamond has shown that when people choose a mate, they tend to choose someone with similar religious or political views to their own. Diamond says we take religion and political views into consideration when choosing a mate or making friends. Whether a person is altruistic or selfish is a cultural behavioral trait, and if we extrapolate from Diamond’s research, we can predict that similar people will cluster together. In addition, among people who have lived under the same cultural influences in a society, it is often possible to determine, albeit uncertainly, the type of person they are dealing with through their speech, facial expressions, and behavior, and if we can determine whether a person is altruistic or selfish before doing business with them, we can see that there will be a tendency for altruistic people to cluster with similar people because they will eventually seek out and do business with altruistic people. From this, we can expect that altruistic people will survive well enough to be found in society through the phenomenon of clustering with similar people.
However, contrary to expectations, the term “clustering” is often used in a sarcastic way and is often used in a negative way. It can be negative. The higher the probability of similar people clustering together, the more altruistic people will be, which can be beneficial to society, but it can also fail to reap the benefits of diversity that come from heterogeneity. Of course, it’s probably too much to hope for the diversity benefits of “selfish” heterogeneity, but it’s easy to see the negative side of the phenomenon of similar people clustering together if you think of a village of extremely nice idiots. For example, you can’t think of inventing machines to make your life a little easier and less work.
Altruistic behavior, which is considered evolutionarily unstable, has been explained by the phenomenon of altruistic people clustering with similar people. In the game above, we saw that altruistic behavior is not the best strategy for an individual if it is traded for selfish behavior, but it is a good enough strategy that it can thrive if similar people make these trades. Since the phenomenon of similar people clustering is likely to occur enough in society that there will be many altruistic people in society who thrive on the phenomenon of similar people clustering. While there may be downsides to altruistic people clustering with like-minded people, society is large enough and altruistic people are diverse enough that altruistic people clustering with like-minded people is unlikely to have a significant impact on the flourishing of altruistic people. Furthermore, if this clustering of similar people leads to more altruistic people and everyone helps each other, it would be a good situation for everyone, just like trading cooperative strategies in the game described above.