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Definition
An evolutionarily stable strategy of enforcing cooperation by conditionally helping based on past experience of the recipient’s help.
Introduction
How does the ruthlessly competitive process of natural selection lead to unselfish traits, such as a tendency to help others? Many birds and mammals give alarm calls that help others escape predators, rather than simply and selfishly running away to get farther from the predator than other group members. Primates spend time and energy grooming the fur of others in their group. Vampire bats regurgitate a portion of their food to feed hungry groupmates, even nonrelatives, which failed to feed. If these costly investments in helping others could have been spent furthering one’s own reproductive success, then why would natural selection reward these behaviors? The puzzle is that cooperative individuals pay a cost to increase the reproductive success of others, while more selfish individuals are...
References
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Carter, G. (2016). Nonhuman Reciprocal Altruism. In: Weekes-Shackelford, V., Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3055-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3055-2
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Latest
Nonhuman Reciprocal Altruism- Published:
- 12 December 2016
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3055-2
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Original
Nonhuman Reciprocal Altruism- Published:
- 16 September 2016
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3055-1