Reciprocal Altruism - Known Emotional Dispositions As A Complex Regulating System For Reciprocal Altruism

Known Emotional Dispositions As A Complex Regulating System For Reciprocal Altruism

The human altruistic system is a sensitive and unstable one. Therefore, the tendency to give, to cheat, and the response to other’s acts of giving and cheating must be regulated by a complex psychology in each individual. Individuals differ in the degree of these tendencies and responses. According to Trivers the following emotional dispositions and their evolution can be understood in terms of regulation of altruism.

  • Friendship and emotions of liking and disliking.
  • Moralistic aggression. A protection mechanism from cheaters acts to regulate the advantage of cheaters in selection against the altruists. The moralistic altruist may want to educate or even punish a cheater.
  • Gratitude and sympathy. A fine regulation of altruism can be associated with gratitude and sympathy in terms of cost/benefit and the level in which the beneficiary will reciprocate.
  • Guilt and repetitive altruism. Prevents the cheater from cheating again. The cheater shows his regret in order to save him from paying too dearly for his acts.
  • Subtle cheating. A stable evolutionary equilibrium could include a low percentage of mimics in controversial support of adaptive sociopathy.
  • Trust and suspicion. These are regulators for cheating and subtle cheating.
  • Partnerships. Altruism with the purpose of creating friendships.

However, it is to be noted that there is no concrete explanation on how individuals pick partners because of the scarcity of theoretical and experimental researches that assess the importance of choice; theoretically, models indicate that evolution of behaviors associated with altruism involving partner choices rarely occur due to variability of costs and benefits between multiple individuals. Therefore, it is believed that the time or frequency of reciprocal actions contribute more to an individual's choice of partner than the actual reciprocal act itself .

Read more about this topic:  Reciprocal Altruism

Famous quotes containing the words emotional, dispositions, complex, regulating, system and/or reciprocal:

    Her personality had an architectonic quality; I think of her when I see some of the great London railway termini, especially St. Pancras, with its soot and turrets, and she overshadowed her own daughters, whom she did not understand—my mother, who liked things to be nice; my dotty aunt. But my mother had not the strength to put even some physical distance between them, let alone keep the old monster at emotional arm’s length.
    Angela Carter (1940–1992)

    ... two men could be just alike in all their dispositions to verbal behavior under all possible sensory stimulations, and yet the meanings or ideas expressed in their identically triggered and identically sounding utterances could diverge radically, for the two men, in a wide range of cases.
    Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)

    When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.
    Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)

    What makes some internal feature of a thing a representation could only its role in regulating the behavior of an intentional system.
    Daniel Clement Dennett (b. 1942)

    In the end we beat them with Levi 501 jeans. Seventy-two years of Communist indoctrination and propaganda was drowned out by a three-ounce Sony Walkman. A huge totalitarian system ... has been brought to its knees because nobody wants to wear Bulgarian shoes.... Now they’re lunch, and we’re number one on the planet.
    —P.J. (Patrick Jake)

    Of course we will continue to work for cheaper electricity in the homes and on the farms of America; for better and cheaper transportation; for low interest rates; for sounder home financing; for better banking; for the regulation of security issues; for reciprocal trade among nations and for the wiping out of slums. And my friends, for all of these we have only begun to fight.
    Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)