Tag Archives: altruism

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).

Ultimatum and dictator in four-year-olds

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Lucas, M., Wagner, L., & Chow, C. (2008). Fair game: The intuitive economics of resource exchange in four-year olds. Journal of Social, Evolutionary, And, 2(3), 74–88. Retrieved from http://137.140.1.71/jsec/articles/volume2/issue3/JSEC2-3_Lucas.pdf

This is an interesting paper in an area that needs more research, namely, how children perform in economic games. The typical questions go as follows: Are children altruistic? Are they selfish?

The authors review and criticize some of the relevant previous research. Murnighan & Saxon (1998) found that kindergartners made larger ultimatum offers and accepted smaller ultimatum offers of candy than did third or sixth graders. However, Lucas et. al argue that Murnighan & Saxon’s results are probably not valid since they use a kind of simulated game, in which the child is asked to imagine that another child offers such and such amount of candy (instead of actually playing the ultimatum game). They also quote Harbaugh, Krause, & Liday (2003), who found that seven-year olds made and accepted smaller ultimatum proposals than adults; and Hill and Sally (2006), who found that 6-year-olds already make offers as fair as those of adults after repeated rounds of play. Benenson, Pascoe and Radmore (2007), on the other hand, found that very young children can be altruistic when playing dictator (4-year-olds donated, on average, 25% of a stake of ten stickers to another classmate).

The authors also mention a problem with some of the previous research: often, researchers make children play with tokens that have no inherent value; children are explained that they will be able to trade the tokens for other stuff later. Lucas et al. argue that researchers should use items with tangible, real value for children, such as candy, stickers or toys, since the use of “symbolic” tokens poses additional cognitive demands on children and might affect experimental results.

Lucas et al. found, in their own study, that children made, on average, offers of 4.7 stickers in the ultimatum game and 3.99 stickers in the dictator game. That is, children seem to be making quite fair offers.

It is well established that adults give an average of 40% of the money at stake in ultimatum. But there is a big difference between the 4-year-olds’ 47% and the adults’ 40%. In adults, the mode (i.e., the most frequent answer) is 50%, while some adults give 40%, 30% or less, and almost no one offers more than 50%. However, some of Lucas el al.’s 4-year-olds offer more than 50%.  They call this phenomenon hyperfair offers. There is a qualitative difference between adults and children: adults oscillate between the fair (“half and half”) and the strategic (“less than half”). Many children, by way of contrast, offer more than is fair, more than half the stake.

“(…) the percentage of hyperfair offers (…) increased from 18% in the dictator game to 33% in the ultimatum game. Adults, in contrast, almost never make hyperfair offers (only 3.5% of offers in Lucas, Et al., (2007) were hyperfair).”

Lucas et al. also report that, in their study, children did not seem to take into account the behavior of the other player in their responses, even if it was unfair. In the dictator game, children did not change the amount of their offer in response to receiving either a low or fair offer from the friend. Children’s offers for the second game were also not affected by whether the friend had accepted or rejected the child’s first offer.

The results of the dictator game suggest that children in the sample are quite altruistic: “The adult average offer of 20% of the stake in the dictator game (Camerer, 2003) is usually interpreted as evidence that individuals have preferences for altruism, since proposers could offer less in a dictator game without fear of rejection. With an average offer in the dictator game of 40% of the stake, our sample of children made more altruistic offers than adults.”

Children’s average offer of 4 stickers (or 40% of the stickers at stake) doubles adults’ typical offer of 20% of the money at stake in dictator, and does not seem to far away from the 47% children offered in the ultimatum game. How do Lucas et al. explain these data? “(Children’s) ability to perform a cost/benefit analysis was limited. They did not seem to appreciate the degree to which they could “shade” their offers without penalty.” Thus, Lucas et al. are assuming that children have the desire or goal of keeping as many stickers as possible but they that their strategic thinking is deficient. “Children were more generous than they needed to be and were limited in their ability to act strategically in bargaining games in order to maximize their own benefits while avoiding the costs of rejection.”

Lucas et al.’s conclusion: “children are quite altruistic”, “they may have an innate sense of fairness and altruism.” This result is, in my opinion, over-simplistic. Previous research in economic psychology has established that adults are altruistic and fair to some degree, but also a little bit selfish and strategic. Lucas et al. assume, therefore, that either children are born altruistic, fair and strategic or they learn these behaviors along the way. If research shows that children are completely selfish, then altruism is learned. If it shows they are altruistic from the start, then it must be innate.

I quote them: “We predicted that children would perform similarly to adults in showing preferences for fairness and altruism. Alternatively, and as some others have found, children could be less fair, indicating that fairness must be learned over the course of development.”

They start with a binary opposition between selfishness and altruism. In this approach, learning is seen as lineal, cumulative, unidirectional. They start with some innate concepts and, while learning, children simply absorb information from their milieu or copy adult models, until they reach the end-point.

There are other possibilities, however. For example: young children might be neither selfish nor altruistic. They might be following other types of reciprocity not related to the fair, contract-like, 50/50 reciprocity of adults. They might use an associative reciprocity of the kind “I give a lot of stickers to the other kid because I like to make friends” (see Faigenbaum, 2005), that are typical of children’s peer cultures and of exchanges within the family. Such an approach dispels the apparent inconsistencies of previous research: it’s not just that children are not yet able to think “strategically”. They are not even interested in this kind of reasoning.

Associative reciprocity might explain why kindergartners make large ultimatum offers and accepted small ultimatum offers of candy (Murnighan & Saxon, 1998) or why 4-year-olds can be so altruistic when playing dictator (Benenson, Pascoe and Radmore, 2007). It might also explain the results of Lucas et al.’s own research, for example, why children give 40% of the stake in the dictator game.

Some references

Faigenbaum, G. (2005). Children’s Economic Experience: Exchange. Buenos Aires: LibrosEnRed.

Harbaugh, W. T., Krause, K. S., & Liday, S. J. (2003). Bargaining by Children. Social Science Research Network, 1–40. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.436504

Lucas, M., Wagner, L., & Chow, C. (2008). Fair game: The intuitive economics of resource exchange in four-year olds. Journal of Social, Evolutionary, And, 2(3), 74–88. Retrieved from http://137.140.1.71/jsec/articles/volume2/issue3/JSEC2-3_Lucas.pdf

Murnighan, J. K., & Saxon, M. S. (1998). Ultimatum bargaining by children and adults. Journal of Economic Psychology, 19(4), 415–445. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0167-4870(98)00017-8

Warneken & Tomasello – Emergence of contingent reciprocity in young children

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Paper #7

Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2013). The emergence of contingent reciprocity in young children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 116(2), 338–350.

This is another crucial study by Tomasello and his team. The researchers designed games to be played individually by the toddlers participating in the study. The child and the researcher would play in parallel, side by side. At some point the child would need more resources to continue playing and these would have to be provided by the researcher; later the researcher would lack resources and the child would have the opportunity to either help the researcher or defect. As the authors put it: “we gave 2- and 3-year-old children the opportunity to either help or share with a partner after that partner either had or had not previously helped or shared with the children. Previous helping did not influence children’s helping. In contrast, previous sharing by the partner led to greater sharing in 3-year-olds but not in 2-year-olds.”

These results do not support theories claiming either that reciprocity is fundamental to the origins of children’s prosocial behavior or that it is irrelevant. Instead, they support an account in which children’s prosocial behavior emerges spontaneously but is later mediated by reciprocity.

It is not until 3.5 years of age that children modulate their sharing contingent on the partner’s antecedent behavior. Children first develop prosocial tendencies (already present in babies or young toddlers) and later those tendencies become mediated by reciprocal strategies. Helping and sharing emerge before children begin to worry about direct reciprocity. Later in development, they seem to become more sensitive to reciprocity, adjusting their prosocial behavior accordingly.