As reported in a recent edition of The Economist, there appears to be a human inclination to to be cooperative, even trusting and kind toward strangers--as long as there is no present threat, demagoguery or signal to warn or poison us against it. An evolutionary basis for trust among those in family or community relationship has long been accepted. But in the case of strangers, it has generally been thought some extraordinary situation or context was required to explain it. Now, this new study uses computer simulations meant to reflect real life interactions, consequences and probabilities, and runs 10,000 generational iterations to reach the conclusion that such openness and kindness to strangers is indeed alive and well, and very likely has evolutionary origins.
From The Economist:
THE extraordinary success of Homo sapiens is a result of four things: intelligence, language, an ability to manipulate objects dexterously in order to make tools, and co-operation... At the moment co-operation is the most fashionable subject of investigation. In particular, why are humans so willing to collaborate with unrelated strangers, even to the point of risking being cheated by people whose characters they cannot possibly know?
Evidence from economic games played in the laboratory for real money suggests humans are both trusting of those they have no reason to expect they will ever see again, and surprisingly unwilling to cheat them—and that these phenomena are deeply ingrained in the specie's psychology. Existing theories of the evolution of trust depend either on the participants being relatives (and thus sharing genes) or on their relationship being long-term, with each keeping count to make sure the overall benefits of collaboration exceed the costs. Neither applies in the case of passing strangers, and that has led to speculation that something extraordinary, such as a need for extreme collaboration prompted by the emergence of warfare that uses weapons, has happened in recent human evolution to promote the emergence of an instinct for unconditional generosity.
Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, two doyens of the field, who work at the University of California, Santa Barbara, do not agree. They see no need for extraordinary mechanisms and the latest study to come from their group (the actual work was done by Andrew Delton and Max Krasnow, who have just published the results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) suggests they are right. It also shows the value of applying common sense to psychological analyses—but then of backing that common sense with some solid mathematical modeling...
After a certain amount of time the agents reproduced in proportion to their accumulated fitness [success]; the old generation died, and the young took over. The process was then repeated for 10,000 generations (equivalent to about 200,000 years of human history, or the entire period for which Homo sapiens has existed), to see what level of collaboration would emerge.
The upshot was that, as the researchers predicted, generosity pays—or, rather, the cost of early selfishness is greater than the cost of trust... For most plausible sets of costs, benefits and chances of future encounters the simulation found that it pays to be trusting, even though you will sometimes be cheated. Which, if you think about it, makes perfect sense... No need, then, for special mechanisms to explain generosity. An open hand to the stranger makes evolutionary as well as moral sense.
Of course, modeling assumptions, conditions and contingencies can always be questioned or challenged. The modeling in this research is no exception. Still, a rigorous and logical thought process appears to have gone into the modeling and the research. And, if we can remove ourselves from the hot-button issues and demagoguery, the fear and animosity so often incited in us toward different ethnicities and faith perspectives, foreign or immigrant populations, then the notion of welcoming and helping strangers really does resonate with us all, doesn't it?---"Welcome, Stranger: The Evolution of Generosity," The Economist, Science and Technology section (7.30.11)
Absent the sense of economic threat, or threat to our sense of identity and community, aren't we most likely to greet all people from a more welcoming and helpful stance? Isn't our unthreatened impulse to be kind, supportive and generous to others, whether or not they are strangers or in some way foreign to us? I think so, and I think that's true for most people I know.
Hospitality runs deep in us through our history in community and among communities. And it has been buttressed by the faith teachings and practice dictates of the Abrahamic faiths and other deistic and nondeistic spiritualities and philosophies, East and West--even if they are often and wisely suspended in cases of real or threatened harm. So it appears this evolved impulse derives from the multi-generational experience of peoples with their feet set firmly on the ground, even as it is reinforced from the founts of wisdom on high.
If only we could eliminate those features of group interaction (including the exploitative demagoguery) that threaten the well-being, identity or peace of others. Isn't trust, generosity and cooperation so much more appealing? Doesn't it feel so much more assuring and secure? But much of that, too, is a function of our evolved attentiveness to danger, our wariness of potential threats, our self-protectiveness. At the least then, we must more consistently identify, deny and ignore the exploitative populist demagogues and bigots, lay bare the avarice and ambitions for power that drive them, and the divisive designs and methods they shamelessly employ.
That is not to say there are not very good reasons to be fearful and self-protective among certain people or groups, in certain situations or venues. We all know that. But the insidious part, the exploitative part, is using our fears to generalize the real threats to larger groups and conditions that pose no real threat at all--and in the process, deny us access to so many good people who would also be good friends.
Link to the article at the cite above, or here:
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