Abstract
Evolutionary psychology is a discipline devoted to understanding the human mind under a unifying meta-theoretical framework—the theory of natural selection (e.g., Barkow et al. in The adapted mind: evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. Oxford University Press, New York, 1992; Buss in Evolutionary psychology: the new science of the mind. Routledge, Oxon, 2015; Pinker in How the mind works. Norton, New York, 1997).
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Notes
- 1.
Relatedness is often understood as the chance that two individuals share a particular gene by common descent. However, it is more accurately defined as a regression coefficient—the degree to which the actor’s genotype predicts the recipient’s genotype. If r is positive and high, an individual with an altruistic allele (A) is likely to help other individuals with A (see McElreath and Boyd 2007). Since relatedness is not probability, it can take a negative value. Negative relatedness implies that each individual with A interacts with individuals without the gene (nonkin) more frequently than by chance.
- 2.
In fact, West et al. (2011) maintained that the model of strong reciprocity is a variant of the limited dispersal model of kin selection (recall that the limited dispersal model can explain the evolution of unconditional cooperation). The proponents of strong reciprocity seem to notice the mathematical equivalence (e.g., Bowles and Gintis 2011). However, they also seem to interpret that strong reciprocity cannot be accounted for by kin selection because strong reciprocators do not rely on any kinship cues in deciding whether to cooperate. However, as is obvious from the fact that the limited dispersal model is involved in kin selection, evolutionary biologists do not consider that the applicability of kin selection hinges on organisms’ use of kinship cues. Such different conceptualizations of kin selection seem to be a major cause of controversy between the proponents of strong reciprocity and standard evolutionary biologists.
- 3.
Although the notion of reciprocal altruism was originally developed in biology, the question of whether many instances of animal cooperation, in fact, require the notion of reciprocity (especially TFT-based reciprocity) is controversial (Dugatkin 1997; Silk 2003). A textbook example of reciprocity in biology is food-sharing among vampire bats: they regurgitate undigested blood in order to feed hungry roostmates (Wilkinson 1990). However, whether their food-sharing habit qualifies as an instance of reciprocity (and if so, to what extent) has yet to be firmly determined (Carter and Wilkinson 2013).
- 4.
There is also some circumstantial evidence indicating that friendship is associated with need-based transfers. For example, people seem to be more attentive to their friends’ needs. In a psychology experiment, when participants engaged in a joint task with their friends, they paid more attention to their partner’s needs, whereas when they engaged in the same task with strangers, they paid attention to the partner’s contribution, instead of needs (Clark 1984). Moreover, when friends fail to pay attention to their needs, people tend to perceive this as a sort of betrayal and as damaging to their relationship (Yamaguchi et al. 2015). There is also evidence on the flipside: When people notice that someone (a stranger) is paying attention to their needs, they increase their intimacy and tend to behave more favorably toward the person (Ohtsubo et al. 2014; Ohtsubo and Yamaguchi 2017).
- 5.
This argument may convey the impression that the critical condition for the evolution of indirect reciprocity is equivalent to the condition for the evolution of direct reciprocity (TFT-based reciprocity). However, in his review of five prominent rules of the evolution of cooperation, Nowak (2006) pointed out that the evolution of indirect reciprocity hinges on the cost of information acquisition. It is not evolvable unless the information about others’ past behaviors is cheaply available.
- 6.
The explanation of second-order information is slightly inaccurate here. The standing strategy assigns a bad reputation to those who do not give a resource to a “good” player. Therefore, the second-order information is not simply Y’s behavior; it is determined by Y’s behavior and Z’s reputation (not Z’s behavior): Y’s decision not to help Z is justified if Z’s reputation is “bad,” but is not justified if Z’s reputation is “good.” Nevertheless, in the experimental setting, it is difficult to accurately operationalize the second-order information. If the experimenter wishes to give this kind of information, it requires disclosing all past partners’ behaviors from the outset of the experiment (assuming that all players start with a good reputation).
- 7.
This result is important given Nowak’s (2006) model indicating that the evolution of indirect reciprocity crucially depends on the cost of information acquisition.
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Ohtsubo, Y., Tanaka, H. (2019). Evolutionary Psychology and Economic Game Experiments. In: Kawagoe, T., Takizawa, H. (eds) Diversity of Experimental Methods in Economics. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6065-7_6
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