People try to do right by each other, no matter the motivation, study finds

pseudolus | 218 points

> "From an evolutionary perspective, it's kind of perplexing that it even exists, because you're decreasing your own fitness on behalf of others," Melamed said. "And yet, we see it in bees and ants, and humans and throughout all of nature."

I find this concluding remark really amusing. Even after performing the experiment, the researcher still can't really fathom the possibility that his views should be reassessed.

If this behavior is present in humans and many other species, couldn't it simply be that in a more sophisticated way it actually increases fitness? Faced with these observations, shouldn't you maybe reassess your ideas about evolution?

leto_ii | 4 years ago

It depends on who the stranger is.

My grandma grew up on the fjords of Norway on an island with a population of ~100.

The island was split with a very large hill that separate the east from the west. On the west were the fishers, and on the east were the farmers.

Each side was taught to look down on and distrust the other side...

Humans are very tribal, and for most people, if a stranger looks like they could join the tribe, they might be offered help.

My black cousin in the military still gets pulled over by police all the time. When they want to search his vehicle, he is smart enough to ask for a warrant, after which they use the tactic ‘Lower your voice!’ to escalate.

mensetmanusman | 4 years ago

How do you get people into a trial like this without the bias of either "people kind enough to spend time helping research" or "people who need money enough that being a paid test subject is worth their time"?

Might not matter for something like a vaccine trial, but for this?

corin_ | 4 years ago

Title of the paper: "The robustness of reciprocity: Experimental evidence that each form of reciprocity is robust to the presence of other forms of reciprocity"

I think the interesting point about this paper isn't the conclusion, which is unsurprising, but rather the methods used for confirming it (They use linear mixed models, which I hadn't encountered before).

scribu | 4 years ago

Human morals/behavior aren't like a fractal that's the same at every level. Let's see a study like this where much larger amounts are in play.

As a young adult, my dad warned me that people are basically honorable up to about $10K. In practice, I've found everyone's threshold is different and fluctuates greatly with their individual situation and the broader economic situation. For example, right now I'm seeing otherwise successful and decent folks do really ugly things over 4 figure money.

djyaz1200 | 4 years ago

This matches my experience.

I've practised "paying it forward" and the rewards have been incredible. I've got way more back than I ever gave. People are always ready to be nice to each other, but sometimes wary of strangers.

I've seen the other side of it, too. Where people approach situations with a "what's in it for me" attitude, and get nowhere. Their fear of getting ripped off, or "losing" in the interaction, stops them from being trusted.

marcus_holmes | 4 years ago

Read something once about the best way to interact with other humans. It boiled down to, you can scratch someone's back once but you don't scratch it again until they've scratched yours. If someone does it to you first be sure to pay them back.

stormdennis | 4 years ago

I would say people freely give who feel that they gain from the community far more than they give. And they do right by others when they feel the community is doing right by them.

And this is not PER INTERACTION but over the long haul.

People that are not connected to their community strongly, meaning they don't have mutliple adults protecting, disciplining and sustaining them, aren't as likely to do right by others or give freely.

Sons without fathers living in the home are far more likely to have behavioral problems. I think we grow into our social hierarchy or we seek to establish a new one that competes and clashes with the existing one.

Unfortunately, the trend more and more across most groups is single parent families.

stretchwithme | 4 years ago

Lot's of mention of 'in the real world...', only to find they organized a contrived online game to 'prove' their argument.

Luc | 4 years ago

There are people who have learned that being kind and generous attracts people, and once they have got them close to them, they start to use or abuse them, push them to feed their ego with praise and have them work for them to live a comfortable life.

The discussions with strangers with their narcissistic self-praises give them all the kick they desire to feel in their life. Nothing matters more to them.

qwertox | 4 years ago

How do they factor in context and framing?

- The oceans are filling with plastic so people with perfectly good tap water can drink bottled water

- Sea levels rising so people in deserts can cool their homes and offices to 60

- Aquifers drain for golf courses in the desert

- Sweatshops, data breaches, 9/11, etc

I'm sure terrorists feel they are doing right by someone when they blow something up, but even the most zealous must realize not everyone agrees with them.

spodek | 4 years ago

These people do not live where I live. Of course, my observation is a singular data point, but speaking with colleagues through the years, it seems everyone in this area is of the "I will help you, but what is in it for me" philosophy. I wonder where they picked these participants from.

readingnews | 4 years ago

There is a class which is behavioral evolution from stanford which covers these topics. There are other frameworks to look at it from like individual selection theory (try to make sure your dna survives) kin selection (your family shares your dna so try to pass that on as well, even if you sacrifice yourself). There are even more ways to look but I’m too much of noob to elaborate on them. But bottom line some behaviors might not help you and your dna but similar enough dna for you to want to sacrifice yourself. Robert Sapolsky is the professor and you can find the lectures on youtube, highly recommend all though i only finished 4 of them so far.

foooobaba | 4 years ago

On the other side, if you want to know when people are going to be selfish and harmful towards one another, look for the situation where they have unaccountable power over another without consequences. Every time.

There is a reason that the stereotype exists of the mad king or queen yelling “ off with their heads!” or feeling a pea under 18 mattresses or otherwise acting like a spoiled toddler. It’s the same reason that police walk around beating peaceful protesters and acting shocked and indignant that anyone would object. That’s what power turns a person into.

fallingfrog | 4 years ago

Is there not a consideration for the act being beneficial for the group (species) and that considerations have been elevated beyond either of the individuals concerns subconsciously? Ants are the obvious comparison, being very quick to sacrifice themselves to maintain a path to food for the group.

have_faith | 4 years ago
teekert | 4 years ago

I think an underappreciated factor in the drake equation is whether an intelligent species is able to form and maintain societies. For all our issues as a species, we're surprisingly good at forming everything from tribes to nations...

LatteLazy | 4 years ago

Reminds me of how some newspaper explained that "Covid showed us how unselfish we were all being" or something to that effect. They conveniently missed the part when everyone was hoarding toilet paper at the start of the crisis.

collyw | 4 years ago

It's a pity they didn't go to the next stage.

Does doing others a favour build up 'social assets' you can call in? Are people in your debt? For how long?

You could even call it testing the MacGyver Principle. How many favours can you pull in?

neilwilson | 4 years ago

They don't outline how they removed culture from the study.

Maybe this applies only to people in Ohio? Or maybe those nice canadians next door?

question11 | 4 years ago

Hilarious how much effort has to go into is realizing how absurd the dogma of the individual actor is

kingkawn | 4 years ago

People want to help each other when they shoot each other in the face?

executive | 4 years ago

>For this study, which was done online, participants had to decide how much of a 10-point endowment to give to other people. The points had monetary value to the participants; giving cost them something.

Totally contrived study which completely ignores culture. Growing up in a shitty area in NYC for example will teach you that plenty of people are all too eager to act selfishly even when it is trivial to be considerate.

Soft sciences are a joke and they erode layman credibility in hard sciences.

tw000001 | 4 years ago

I've just read the 'Media' version of the 'study'

But yes, humans are intrinsically social.

But what's actually matters is how much.

Bending over once a year to pick up rubbish vs spending a day.

What we need it know is how to maximise it in more cases (for good or evil) these studies are more about clicks. You barely know what's going on when the cost is so low.

aaron695 | 4 years ago

What a misleading title.

Apparently there are 4 motivators to benefit others.

One: The recipient of a kindness is inclined to do something nice for the giver in return.

Two: A person is motivated to do something nice to someone that she saw be generous to a third person.

Three: A person is likely to do good in the presence of people in their network who might reward their generosity.

Four: A person is likely to "pay it forward" to someone else if someone has done something nice for her.

They did a online "study" where they mixed and matched the motivators to see how it affected people's "giving" ( points tied to money ). It's hard to tell from the article, but the assumption was that #1 would dominate people's motivation to give ( return the favor ), but the "study" showed that all 4 motivations and all the permutations still influenced the giving.

So people do "right by each other" given these 4 motivators which ultimately is selfish because they all imply you have gotten something already or you hope to gain something by "doing right".

> "From an evolutionary perspective, it's kind of perplexing that it even exists, because you're decreasing your own fitness on behalf of others," Melamed said. "And yet, we see it in bees and ants, and humans and throughout all of nature."

I can't believe that a "scientist" would even say such nonsense. It isn't evolutionarily perplexing at all. We see it throughout all of nature because it doesn't decrease your fitness on behalf of others. Social networking and cooperation isn't evolutionarily perplexing.

dntbnmpls | 4 years ago

Clearly the study didn't look at police..

Allower | 4 years ago

This is why I seriously believe that our competition-based approach to society is the one major issue we really have, in addition to the many symptoms and consequence that are now popping up.

When you construct (or just arrive at) the foundation of society being built on the polar opposite of cooperation - namely, competition - how could we possibly arrive at a sensible, sustainable, peaceful world?

People want to cooperate, help each other, work together. But in capitalism that goes directly counter to the imposed need to compete, and thus work for your own benefit by working against others.

Glosster | 4 years ago

I completely reject this idea, it's 100% antithetical to the experience I've had in life. People are inherently bad and lack ethics until educated or exposed to it in a group setting. Even then a decent majority of people will continue to adopt a selfish mindset.

I'd posit that as you become wealthier and more successful, your capacity to practice empathy and "doing the right thing" significantly diminishes quickly to a zero sum. You cannot manage above N number "other people" you don't see and interact with in person without mentally converting them into a resource or a number.

The motivation to do the right thing drops out when you don't need societal / communal acceptance and validation of yourself and your actions.

When you're rich enough to not give a fuck, fuck em. I got mine.

Pretty sure this is what's destroying America.

dirtybirdnj | 4 years ago