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Altruism

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Encyclopedia of Sustainable Management

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Definition

Altruistic acts are acts committed with the intention to purposively help others, even at the expense of one’s welfare. The English word altruism comes from Latin word alter which means “other”. Auguste Comte is credited as the originator of the word.

Conditions for the Development of Altruistic Behavior

Various explanations on the origin of altruism and cooperation between beings exist. However, all of those have in common that they emphasize that for the existence of altruism, beings need to have at least some access to the faculty of memory, and they need to be able to distinguish and categorize different members of their and other species in some way. Ability to distinguish between members of different species in turn suggests that they also have some, at least rudimentary, understanding of different beings and their qualities. (Broom 2003, p. 89; Dugatkin and Alfieri 2002). In the context of life in general, e.g., biological altruism, the condition of intention is...

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References

  • Broom, D. (2003). The evolution of morality and religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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  • Dugatkin, L. A., & Alfieri, M. S. (2002). A cognitive approach to the study of animal cooperation. In M. Bekoff, C. Alen, & G. M. Burghardt (Eds.), The cognitive animal. Empirical and theoretical perspectives on animal cognition (pp. 413–419). London: The MIT Press.

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  • Kraut, R. (2018). Altruism. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Spring 2018 ed.). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/altruism/. Accessed 20 Feb 2019.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Luxembourg School of Business, Luxembourg, Luxembourg

    Borna Jalsenjak

  2. Zagreb School of Economics and Management, Zagreb, Croatia

    Borna Jalsenjak

Authors
  1. Borna Jalsenjak
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Correspondence to Borna Jalsenjak .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. London Metropolitan University, Guildhall Faculty of Business and Law London Metropolitan University, London, UK

    Samuel Idowu

  2. Cologne Business School, Ingolstadt, Germany

    René Schmidpeter

  3. College of Business, Loyola University New Orleans, New Orleans, LA, USA

    Nicholas Capaldi

  4. International Training Centre of the IL, International Labor Organization, Turin, Italy

    Liangrong Zu

  5. Department of Economics, Society and Politics, University of Urbino Carlo Bo, Urbino, Italy

    Mara Del Baldo

  6. Instituto Politécnico da Guarda, Guarda, Portugal

    Rute Abreu

Section Editor information

  1. Department of Quality Management and Standardization, University of Belgrade, Faculty of Organizational Sciences, Belgrade, Serbia

    Ivana Mijatovic

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Jalsenjak, B. (2020). Altruism. In: Idowu, S., Schmidpeter, R., Capaldi, N., Zu, L., Del Baldo, M., Abreu, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sustainable Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02006-4_118-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02006-4_118-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-02006-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-02006-4

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Business and ManagementReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences

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