Context Modularity of Human Altruism

Alexander, Marcus; Christia, Fotini

doi:10.1126/science.1202599

Cited by 75 publications

(59 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Results have so far been mixed, suggesting that the precise details of the ecological context mediating altruism are important and their effect is not yet fully understood. Alexander & Christia [8] found that ethnic differences in Mostar, Bosnia can enhance co-operation in some institutional contexts but not others. In an urban context, Wilson et al [9] found that the quality of a neighbourhood (estimated from self-reported levels of support from family, school and neighbourhood) in Binghampton, U.S.A. positively predicted the number of dropped letters that were picked up and posted back.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lost Letter Measure of Variation in Altruistic Behaviour in 20 Neighbourhoods

2012

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Altruistic behaviour varies across human populations and this variation is likely to be partly explained by variation in the ecological context of the populations. We hypothesise that area level socio-economic characteristics will determine the levels of altruism found in individuals living in an area and we use a lost letter experiment to measure altruism across 20 neighbourhoods with a wide range of income deprivation scores in London, UK. The results show a strong negative effect of neighbourhood income deprivation on altruistic behaviour, with letters dropped in the poorest neighbourhoods having 91% lower odds of being returned than letters dropped in the wealthiest neighbourhoods. We suggest that measures of altruism are strongly context dependant.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lost Letter Measure of Variation in Altruistic Behaviour in 20 Neighbourhoods

2012

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“…Pasquale & Samii, 2013) and the resilience of fairness norms (Whitt & Wilson, 2007). At the same time, conflict experience has been linked to increased favouritism of the in-group ("parochialism") (Bauer et al, 2013), which however diminishes through frequent nonthreatening post-conflict interactions with members of other groups (Alexander & Christia, 2011).…”

Section: Contribution To the Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Truly reconciled? A dyadic analysis of post-conflict social reintegration in Northern Uganda

Osborne

D’Exelle

Verschoor

2017

Journal of Peace Research

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In the aftermath of civil war or violent internal conflict, one of the key peace-building challenges is the reconciliation of former enemies who are members of the same smallscale societies. A failure of social reintegration may contribute to what is known as a conflict trap. To detect lingering hostile attitudes among a community's various factions is crucial, but the approaches adopted in previous studies tend to focus on the impact of conflict on one or other aggregated indicator of social cohesion rather than on how violence-affected individuals regard and act towards their fellow community members. Here we demonstrate the value of concentrating on this latter dyadic component of social interactions and use behavioural experiments and a social tie survey to assess, in an appropriately disaggregated manner, social cohesion in a post-conflict setting in northern Uganda. Whereas in self-reported surveys, ex-combatants appear to be well-connected, active members of their communities, the experiments unveil the continued reluctance of other community members to share or cooperate with them; fewer resources are committed to ex-combatants than to others, which is statistically significant. The dyadic nature of our analysis allows us to detect which groups are more prone to discriminate against excombatants, which may help facilitate targeted interventions.

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“…pressure (study participants are asked to decide cooperate or defect within certain seconds in economic games) can improve the level of cooperation 14 . Another study found that the introduction of integrative institutions activates altruism and improves cooperation among deeply divided ethnoreligious groups 15 . A series of studies found that an exposure to oxytocin through nasal intake improved the level of cooperation 16,17 .…”

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confidence: 99%

Mindfulness Meditation Activates Altruism

Iwamoto

Alexander

Torres

et al. 2020

Sci Rep

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Clinical evidence suggests that mindfulness meditation reduces anxiety, depression, and stress, and improves emotion regulation due to modulation of activity in neural substrates linked to the regulation of emotions and social preferences. However, less was known about whether mindfulness meditation might alter pro-social behavior. Here we examined whether mindfulness meditation activates human altruism, a component of social cooperation. Using a simple donation game, which is a real-world version of the Dictator's Game, we randomly assigned 326 subjects to a mindfulness meditation online session or control and measured their willingness to donate a portion of their payment for participation as a charitable donation. Subjects who underwent the meditation treatment donated at a 2.61 times higher rate than the control (p = 0.005), after controlling for socio-demographics. We also found a larger treatment effect of meditation among those who did not go to college (p < 0.001) and those who were under 25 years of age (p < 0.001), with both subject groups contributing virtually nothing in the control condition. Our results imply high context modularity of human altruism and the development of intervention approaches including mindfulness meditation to increase social cooperation, especially among subjects with low baseline willingness to contribute.Cooperation is an essential behavior in constructing and maintaining human societies and the past two decades of cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics experiments have improved our understanding of neurophysiological bases of such behavior. Neuroimaging suggests that cooperation is associated with reward-processing brain areas including rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) 1 , which is known to modulate fear processing in amygdala 2 ; as well as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), nucleus accumbens (NACC), and caudate 3-5 . Recent research gives us an even more granular view of the pathways involved, showing that "pay-it-forward" indirect reciprocity (altruism without expectation of returned favor, which underlies large-scale cooperation, specifically based on empathy and other-regarding social preferences rather than reputation) is associated with activation of the anterior insula (AI), which in turn regulates the caudate 6 .Cooperation can be generally defined as individual behavior whereby "one individual pays a cost for others to receive a benefit" 7 . Cooperation can be further modelled as equilibrium of games where subjects still act in their self-interest but their utility function (a function that defines individual preferences of given scenarios) includes social preferences that have been modelled in various ways, such as inequity aversion, a second utility function over others ' well-being, etc 8-10 . In the present study we focus on the act of making a private decision regarding what proportion of payment to keep for oneself and what proportion to make as a charitable donation, which is a form of indirect reciprocity or generalized altruism....

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Context Modularity of Human Altruism

Cited by 75 publications

References 15 publications

Lost Letter Measure of Variation in Altruistic Behaviour in 20 Neighbourhoods

Lost Letter Measure of Variation in Altruistic Behaviour in 20 Neighbourhoods

Truly reconciled? A dyadic analysis of post-conflict social reintegration in Northern Uganda

Mindfulness Meditation Activates Altruism

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