Book Review: From Helping to Hand Grenades: Setting the Bar for Altruism

Abstract

In Kindness in a Cruel World: the Evolution of Altruism, Nigel Barber suggests that "Kindness exists, but it struggles to stay afloat on an ocean of cruelty that is the default condition for organisms competing for existence on this planet" (p. 9). The main premise of Barber's book is that humans inherit a capacity for altruism that can be enhanced or diminished through nurture. Barber suggests that the core of this capacity evolved through kin selection and is reflected in parental investment. From this center, altruism ripples outward in concentric circles to reciprocity between members of ingroups, systems of cooperation in societies, and relations among nations. However, the larger the circle, the weaker the altruistic dispositions. In supporting this model, Barber adduces a potpourri of evidence drawn from a wide array of disciplines, including evolutionary biology, economics, political science, history, social and developmental psychology, game theory, anthropology, and neuroscience. By and large, this book is a good read for lay people and students, but we fear evolutionary psychologists will find many of the analyses simplified and compartmentalized, and some of the conclusions overgeneralized and sensationalized. We were also disappointed by Barber's failure to define the central construct of the book, altruism, in a consistent manner, and his tendency to use the word to refer to quite different phenomena.