Why can’t humans stop being selfish? What is the role and impact of the spatial structure effect?

The spatial structure effect explains why selfish behavior doesn’t go away, and explores how physical distance affects social interactions.

 

We know that altruistic behavior is socially desirable and that selfish behavior is unacceptable, which is why when we read in the news about a public official taking a bribe, a vendor misrepresenting the ingredients of a product, or a captain abandoning passengers on a sinking cruise ship, we are outraged by their selfish behavior and hope that it will never happen again. But why does human selfishness persist?
One of the theories that provides an answer to this question is the “spatial structure effect”. The spatial structure effect means that human behavior is influenced by spatial structure. In this case, spatial structure refers to how far away a person is from other members of a society. For example, in a society of 100 people, the distance between any two people, or the spatial structure, depends on where you place each of them. If you arrange these people in a 10×10 checkerboard arrangement, the closest people to a person are their neighbors in the east-west and north-south directions, while the rest of the people are farther away from them than they are from their neighbors. Or, at the other extreme, consider an arrangement where the distance to the other 99 people is equal to one space in the checkerboard. This case is similar to the Internet, a wide area network where you interact in real time with an unknown number of people at a distance.
So why do spatial structure effects affect human behavior? Because physical distance determines the quality and quantity of interactions between members of a society. Let’s recall the two spatial structures we mentioned earlier. We can imagine a person placed within these spatial structures shaking hands with a random member of the society: in the checkerboard arrangement, the further away the target is, the greater the effort required to shake hands, whereas in the extreme arrangement, all members of the society are as close as neighbors, and anyone can shake hands with them with equal effort. If we now consider the behavior of shaking hands as an interaction between members of a society, we can begin to see how the quality and quantity of interactions between members will be affected by the spatial structure.
Now, how can spatial structure effects explain things like the example of selfish behavior in the first paragraph? The captain of a sinking cruise ship obviously has two choices. One is to stay on the sinking ship until all the passengers have escaped, and the other is to leave them behind and escape alone. Conventional wisdom would categorize the former as selfless and the latter as selfish. Of course, the behavio that society expects is to stay on board until the end so that the passengers can escape. However, the fact that passengers are left behind and abandon ship can be explained by the unique spatial structure of cruise ships. In a sinking ship, the captain can only interact with the crew and passengers around him and the maritime police, who can be contacted through communications. In other words, it is difficult to interact with all members of society who expect altruistic behavior, so the captain is forced to take a selfish action of abandoning the ship.
But what if the ship’s sinking was being broadcast live across the country, and the captain was aware of this fact, would his behavior have been different? We can’t say for sure. The spatial structure effect only introduces a difference in interaction, and ultimately a person’s behavior is determined by a complex set of conditions other than spatial structure. What is clear, however, is that spatial structure effects can influence the tendency to behave altruistically or selfishly, and it is possible that spatial structure effects could have changed the behavior of someone who was acting selfishly, such as the captain in the example above.