Monthly Archives: March 2023

Egalitarianism, altruism, spite and parochialism in childhood and adolescence – Fehr and collaborators

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A short comment on two excellent and widely-read papers by Fehr and his collaborators: “Egalitarianism in young children” and “The development of egalitarianism, altruism, spite and parochialism in childhood and adolescence.”
Putting together these two papers, we can obtain an outline about how children respond to the typical allocation tasks that Fehr has used in his research with several samples of children and adults.
Oversimplifying, such an outline would look as follows:

  • Children give generous responses to the tasks between 3 and 6 years of age.
  • Starting from an age of six to eight years, children show already a tendency to sacrifice their own resources in order to be fair, increasing the likelihood of egalitarian allocations
  • Children give the most egalitarian, or “inequality-adverse” responses between 8 and 11 years of age (“egalitarianism peaks around the age of 8-11 years”).
  • Starting at 10 years of age, children start giving more altruistic responses, that are also “efficient” in the sense that they maximize the sum of payoffs (“the biggest possible cake”).
  • While previous studies have found that egalitarianism increases sharply in 3- to 8-year-old children, this motive loses its dominance in adolescence when the altruistic type becomes prevalent.
  • The proportion of such altruistic responses continues to increase up to 18 years of age. At that point, children’s responses are similar to those of adults.
  • Children are more altruistic with the ingroup, and less altruistic (and more spiteful) with the outgroup. This effect is higher in males, and increases with age (starting at around 10 years of age).
  • girls are significantly more likely to have egalitarian preferences than boys.
  • The ingroup-outgroup effect is bigger in boys than girls.
    I believe this research confirms the prevalence of an associative culture of peer exchange in preschool children versus a culture of economic, “strict” reciprocity between children starting with primary school.

Fehr, E., Bernhard, H., & Rockenbach, B. (2008). Egalitarianism in young children. Nature, 454(7208), 1079–1083. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature07155
Fehr, E., Glätzle-Rützler, D., & Sutter, M. (2013). The development of egalitarianism, altruism, spite and parochialism in childhood and adolescence. European Economic Review, 64. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2013.09.006

Parochial cooperation in wild chimpanzees: A model to explain the evolution of parochial altruism

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Lemoine, S. R. T., Samuni, L., Crockford, C., & Wittig, R. M. (2022). Parochial cooperation in wild chimpanzees: A model to explain the evolution of parochial altruism. In Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (Vol. 377, Issue 1851). Royal Society Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0149

This is an exceptional paper. The authors define “parochial altruism” as taking individual costs to benefit the in-group and harm the out-group, and propose a model for the evolution of parochial altruism. The model applies to chimpanzees, but the idea is that this model might perhaps also explain how parochial altruism evolved in humans.

For this purpose, the authors review a vast number of papers in the field of cooperation and aggression in wild chimpanzees (and, to some extent, other animals) .

The model they propose is a complex one. It is relevant, for the issues we talk about in this blog, that the authors propose a positive feedback loop between aggressive encounters with external groups, on the one hand, and collaboration and cohesion within the group, on the other.

For example:

  • “In-group solidarity tends to increase in response to out-group conflict, suggesting a causal link between out-group threat and in-group cohesion” (p. 2).
  • “Evidence across taxa, including birds and mammals, demonstrate an immediate increase of in-group cohesion and affiliation following out-group threat, pointing towards the link between out-group conflicts and in-group favoritism” (p. 2).
  • “Cooperation is key in maximizing the chances of beneficial outcomes of out-group conflicts” (p. 5).
  • Group conflicts favor “the emergence and maintenance of cooperation among non-related individuals, the maintenance of strong social ties, in-group favoritism and hostility towards out-group members” (p. 7).
  • “The highly structured and collective border patrols and large coalitionary attacks observed in chimpanzees indeed suggest strong links between group-level cooperation and out-group threat” (p. 8).

All this is important and relevant for the origin of the state, as explained by my mentor, Juan Samaja. Individuals compete against each other (internal war), but the pressure of the external threats makes them unite against the common enemy (external war); this threat is one of the keys to the birth of the state, as already explained in Plato’s Republic.

Another interesting aspect is that the paper establishes a link between reciprocity and what we call “community”. “The accumulation of bonded relationships, embedded within a social network, provides a path by which group-level cooperation occurs. The hypothesis that direct reciprocity constitutes a mechanism enabling solving collective problems finds support in chimpanzees where regular social interactions within a community cement a sense of common belonging (a common affect), enabling group-level collective action and avoidance of defection” (p. 8). This of course works only for local groups and small-scale cooperation; large scale cooperation requires other normative and symbolic frameworks (a flag, a national narrative, etc.)

For those of you (readers) who follow my musings in this blog about the epistemological impact of social coordination, it is interesting to note that chimpanzees engage in border patrols, where they move along the edges of their territories to monitor and defend their boundaries. They check for signs of intruders, such as the scent of unfamiliar individuals or the sound of other chimpanzee groups in the area. If they detect signs of intrusion, they often engage in displays of aggression, such as vocalizing loudly, throwing rocks and branches, or charging at the perceived threat. Now, this behavior might be the oldest precursor of the cultural institution of “boundary”. This institution, incidentally, is the one that philosopher John Searle uses as an example to explain the very notion of “institutions” (differentiating a wall that encircles a village as a physical barrier that can’t be crossed from a symbolic stone that marks the limit of a village and shouldn’t be crossed). Once we humans learned how to play the game of boundaries on an institutional level, we started to demarcate boundaries on the epistemological level. Ancient Rhetoric is born as an exercise to argue for the property of land, to have the limits of one’s property recognized. In Plato’s Republic, the limits of the city are delineated hand in hand with the limits of the citizen (both are defined almost in the same way), as well as the boundaries of the concept (of the Good, for example). Even Kant’s transcendental deduction follows to the detail the format of a legal deductio aimed at demarcating the territory and the boundaries of a state (Kant applies this format to demarcate the limits… of pure reason).