Giving, helping and acting for others.
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201 to 225 of 602Parochial altruism in humans.
Social norms and the associated altruistic behaviours are decisive for the evolution of human cooperation and the maintenance of social order, and they affect family life, politics and economic interactions. However, as altruistic norm compliance and norm enforcement often emerge in the context of inter-group conflicts, they are likely to be shaped by parochialism--a preference for favouring the members of one's ethnic, racial or language group. We have conducted punishment experiments, which allow 'impartial' observers to punish norm violators, with indigenous groups in Papua New Guinea. Here we show that these experiments confirm the prediction of parochialism. We found that punishers protect ingroup victims--who suffer from a norm violation--much more than they do outgroup victims, regardless of the norm violator's group affiliation. Norm violators also expect that punishers will be l…
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Demography, altruism, and the benefits of budding.
It is now widely appreciated that competition between kin inhibits the evolution of altruism. In standard population genetics models, it is difficult for indiscriminate altruism towards social partners to be favoured at all. The reason is that while limited dispersal increases the kinship of social partners it also intensifies local competition. One solution that has received very little attention is if individuals disperse as groups (budding dispersal), as this relaxes local competition without reducing kinship. Budding behaviour is widespread through all levels of biological organization, from early protocellular life to cooperatively breeding vertebrates. We model the effects of individual dispersal, budding dispersal, soft selection and hard selection to examine the conditions under which altruism is favoured. More generally, we examine how these various demographic details feed into…
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Blood donors' perceptions, motivators and deterrents in Sub-Saharan Africa - a scoping review of evidence.
Achieving an adequate blood supply in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) through donor mobilization and retention is crucial. Factors that motivate or deter blood donors vary according to beliefs and social norms. Understanding the factors that influence blood donation behaviour in SSA is vital to developing effective strategies to address blood donor motivation and retention. This review of 35 studies from 16 SSA countries collates available evidence concerning the perceptions, motivators and deterrents that influence blood donors in SSA. The review revealed a common understanding that blood and blood donation save lives. The main deterrent to blood donation was fear due to lack of knowledge and discouraging spiritual, religious and cultural perceptions of blood donation. The main motivators for blood donation were altruism, donating blood for family and incentives. The findings support the need …
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Posttraumatic growth after burn in adults: An integrative literature review.
Posttraumatic growth after burn is a relatively new area of study with only a small number of studies that have examined this phenomenon. It is important to understand the presentation of posttraumatic growth and coping in burn survivors, how it changes over time and the components which influence growth so that we can understand how to promote posttraumatic growth in burn survivors. The aim of this review was to assess these three parameters. Studies were identified through multiple databases with specific search terms to identify posttraumatic growth after burn. From the 813 articles found, 57 were identified as potentially useful, and 8 as eligible for review; three qualitative, one mixed methods, two quantitative, one discussion paper and part of a review which assessed all psychosocial outcomes. Growth presented as realising personal strength, reprioritising, spirituality, humanity,…
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Leimar O, Hammerstein P (2010)reviewMEDLINE-indexed journal, not yet read by usPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences65 citations Cooperation for direct fitness benefits.
Studies of the evolution of helping have traditionally used the explanatory frameworks of reciprocity and altruism towards relatives, but recently there has been an increasing interest in other kinds of explanations. We review the success or otherwise of work investigating alternative processes and mechanisms, most of which fall under the heading of cooperation for direct benefits. We evaluate to what extent concepts such as by-product benefits, pseudo-reciprocity, sanctions and partner choice, markets and the build-up of cross-species spatial trait correlations have contributed to the study of the evolution of cooperation. We conclude that these alternative ideas are successful and show potential to further increase our understanding of cooperation. We also bring up the origin and role of common interest in the evolution of cooperation, including the appearance of organisms. We note tha…
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Silk JB (2009)reviewMEDLINE-indexed journal, not yet read by usPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences64 citations Nepotistic cooperation in non-human primate groups.
Darwin was struck by the many similarities between humans and other primates and believed that these similarities were the product of common ancestry. He would be even more impressed by the similarities if he had known what we have learned about primates over the last 50 years. Genetic kinship has emerged as the primary organizing force in the evolution of primate social organization and the patterning of social behaviour in non-human primate groups. There are pronounced nepotistic biases across the primate order, from tiny grey mouse lemurs (Microcebus murinus) that forage alone at night but cluster with relatives to sleep during the day, to cooperatively breeding marmosets that rely on closely related helpers to rear their young, rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) females who acquire their mother's rank and form strict matrilineal dominance hierarchies, male howler monkeys that help their…
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Health promotion through forgiveness intervention.
The purpose of this article is to offer evidence-based forgiveness interventions clinically useful to nurses in holistic health promotion for individuals, families, and communities. Forgiveness interventions are developed and described within four approaches inspired by midrange nursing theorists who have adapted their theories from Bandura's Social Learning Theory and Frankl's Theory of Meaning. Interventions are also assimilated from a comprehensive review of theoretical and research literature. The four interventional approaches include persuasive information, vicarious experience, awareness of physiological reactions, and enactive attainment. Barriers to implementation are discussed as well as ways to individualize the interventions.
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Borkman T (2008)reviewMEDLINE-indexed journal, not yet read by usRecent developments in alcoholism : an official publication of the American Medical Society on Alcoholism, the Research Society on Alcoholism, and the National Council on Alcoholism10 citations The twelve-step recovery model of AA: a voluntary mutual help association.
Alcoholism treatment has evolved to mean professionalized, scientifically based rehabilitation. Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is not a treatment method; it is far better understood as a Twelve-Step Recovery Program within a voluntary self-help/mutual aid organization of self-defined alcoholics. The Twelve-Step Recovery Model is elaborated in three sections, patterned on the AA logo (a triangle within a circle): The triangle's legs represent recovery, service, and unity; the circle represents the reinforcing effect of the three legs upon each other as well as the "technology" of the sharing circle and the fellowship. The first leg of the triangle, recovery, refers to the journey of individuals to abstinence and a new "way of living." The second leg, service, refers to helping other alcoholics which also connects the participants into a fellowship. The third leg, unity, refers to the fellowshi…
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Israel S, Lerer E, Shalev I, Uzefovsky F, Reibold M, Bachner-Melman R, Granot R, Bornstein G, Knafo A, Yirmiya N, Ebstein RP (2008)reviewMEDLINE-indexed journal, not yet read by usProgress in brain research65 citations Molecular genetic studies of the arginine vasopressin 1a receptor (AVPR1a) and the oxytocin receptor (OXTR) in human behaviour: from autism to altruism with some notes in between.
Converging evidence from both human and animal studies has highlighted the pervasive role of two neuropeptides, oxytocin (OXT) and arginine vasopressin (AVP), in mammalian social behaviours. Recent molecular genetic studies of the human arginine vasopressin 1a (AVPR1a) and oxytocin (OXTR) receptors have strengthened the evidence regarding the role of these two neuropeptides in a range of normal and pathological behaviours. Significant association between both AVPR1a repeat regions and OXTR single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with risk for autism has been provisionally shown which was mediated by socialization skills in our study. AVPR1a has also been linked to eating behaviour in both clinical and non-clinical groups, perhaps reflecting the social and ritualistic side of eating behaviour. Evidence also suggests that repeat variations in AVPR1a are associated with two other social doma…
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Do positive psychosocial factors predict disease progression in HIV-1? A review of the evidence.
Adding to a traditional stress perspective, behavioral medicine has been focusing increasingly on investigating the potential impact of positive psychosocial factors on disease course in HIV. Dispositional optimism, active coping, and spirituality show the most evidence for predicting slower disease progression, although the data are not entirely consistent. Findings for the role of social support are mixed, although indications are that it may be particularly helpful at later stages of illness. Many of the other constructs (positive affect, finding meaning, emotional expression/processing, openness, extraversion, conscientiousness, altruism, and self-efficacy) have only been examined in one or two studies; results are preliminary but suggestive of protective effects. Plausible behavioral and biological mechanisms are discussed (including health behaviors, neurohormones, and immune measu…
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Using self-efficacy theory to develop interventions that help older people overcome psychological barriers to physical activity: a discussion paper.
Background: Only a fifth of older people undertake a level of physical activity sufficient to lead to health benefit. Misconceptions about the ageing process and beliefs about the costs and benefits of exercise in late life may result in unnecessary self-imposed activity restriction. Thus, adhering to a physical activity can be difficult particularly when the benefits of exercise are often not immediate. Many of the barriers to engaging in physical activity among older people are attitudinal. It is therefore important to take account of the non-physical aspects of physical activity intervention programmes, such as increasing confidence. Self-efficacy is a widely applied theory used to understand health behaviour and facilitate behavioural modification, such as the increase of physical activity.
Aim: This paper aims to examine the ways in which self-efficacy theory might be used in interv…
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Schantz ML (2007)reviewMEDLINE-indexed journal, not yet read by usNursing forum103 citations Compassion: a concept analysis.
Compassion is a quality deemed sine qua non for nursing and claimed to underpin the profession in its larger-than-life scope. Yet the meaning of the concept "compassion" (or "compassionate care") is neither clearly defined in nursing scholarship nor widely promoted in the context of contemporaneous everyday nursing practice. The term in its moral dimension has, at best, been downgraded as an optional practice in everyday nursing care and, at worst, dismissed as lofty ideals connected to other disciplines, such as religion and ethics. A concept analysis using Walker and Avant's strategic method as well as Rodgers's evolutionary paradigm was undertaken to clarify the meaning of the concept "compassion" and examine its relevance in the context of everyday nursing practice.
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Ashton MC, Lee K (2007)reviewMEDLINE-indexed journal, not yet read by usPersonality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc367 citations Empirical, theoretical, and practical advantages of the HEXACO model of personality structure.
The authors argue that a new six-dimensional framework for personality structure--the HEXACO model--constitutes a viable alternative to the well-known Big Five or five-factor model. The new model is consistent with the cross-culturally replicated finding of a common six-dimensional structure containing the factors Honesty-Humility (H), Emotionality (E), eExtraversion (X), Agreeableness (A), Conscientiousness (C), and Openness to Experience (O). Also, the HEXACO model predicts several personality phenomena that are not explained within the B5/FFM, including the relations of personality factors with theoretical biologists' constructs of reciprocal and kin altruism and the patterns of sex differences in personality traits. In addition, the HEXACO model accommodates several personality variables that are poorly assimilated within the B5/FFM.
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Testing for altruism and social pressure in charitable giving.
Every year, 90% of Americans give money to charities. Is such generosity necessarily welfare enhancing for the giver? We present a theoretical framework that distinguishes two types of motivation: individuals like to give, for example, due to altruism or warm glow, and individuals would rather not give but dislike saying no, for example, due to social pressure. We design a door-to-door fund-raiser in which some households are informed about the exact time of solicitation with a flyer on their doorknobs. Thus, they can seek or avoid the fund-raiser. We find that the flyer reduces the share of households opening the door by 9% to 25% and, if the flyer allows checking a Do Not Disturb box, reduces giving by 28% to 42%. The latter decrease is concentrated among donations smaller than $10. These findings suggest that social pressure is an important determinant of door-to-door giving. Combinin…
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Fairness expectations and altruistic sharing in 15-month-old human infants.
Human cooperation is a key driving force behind the evolutionary success of our hominin lineage. At the proximate level, biologists and social scientists have identified other-regarding preferences--such as fairness based on egalitarian motives, and altruism--as likely candidates for fostering large-scale cooperation. A critical question concerns the ontogenetic origins of these constituents of cooperative behavior, as well as whether they emerge independently or in an interrelated fashion. The answer to this question will shed light on the interdisciplinary debate regarding the significance of such preferences for explaining how humans become such cooperative beings. We investigated 15-month-old infants' sensitivity to fairness, and their altruistic behavior, assessed via infants' reactions to a third-party resource distribution task, and via a sharing task. Our results challenge curren…
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The evolution of human cooperation.
Darwin viewed cooperation as a perplexing challenge to his theory of natural selection. Natural selection generally favors the evolution of behaviors that enhance the fitness of individuals. Cooperative behavior, which increases the fitness of a recipient at the expense of the donor, contradicts this logic. William D. Hamilton helped to solve the puzzle when he showed that cooperation can evolve if cooperators direct benefits selectively to other cooperators (i.e. assortment). Kinship, group selection and the previous behavior of social partners all provide mechanisms for assortment (Figure 1), and kin selection and reciprocal altruism are the foundation of the kinds of cooperative behavior observed in many animals. Humans also bias cooperation in favor of kin and reciprocating partners, but the scope, scale, and variability of human cooperation greatly exceed that of other animals. Here…
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Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) do not develop contingent reciprocity in an experimental task.
Chimpanzees provide help to unrelated individuals in a broad range of situations. The pattern of helping within pairs suggests that contingent reciprocity may have been an important mechanism in the evolution of altruism in chimpanzees. However, correlational analyses of the cumulative pattern of interactions over time do not demonstrate that helping is contingent upon previous acts of altruism, as required by the theory of reciprocal altruism. Experimental studies provide a controlled approach to examine the importance of contingency in helping interactions. In this study, we evaluated whether chimpanzees would be more likely to provide food to a social partner from their home group if their partner had previously provided food for them. The chimpanzees manipulated a barpull apparatus in which actors could deliver rewards either to themselves and their partners or only to themselves. Ou…
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Egalitarianism in young children.
Human social interaction is strongly shaped by other-regarding preferences, that is, a concern for the welfare of others. These preferences are important for a unique aspect of human sociality-large scale cooperation with genetic strangers-but little is known about their developmental roots. Here we show that young children's other-regarding preferences assume a particular form, inequality aversion that develops strongly between the ages of 3 and 8. At age 3-4, the overwhelming majority of children behave selfishly, whereas most children at age 7-8 prefer resource allocations that remove advantageous or disadvantageous inequality. Moreover, inequality aversion is strongly shaped by parochialism, a preference for favouring the members of one's own social group. These results indicate that human egalitarianism and parochialism have deep developmental roots, and the simultaneous emergence o…
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Awe, the small self, and prosocial behavior.
Awe is an emotional response to perceptually vast stimuli that transcend current frames of reference. Guided by conceptual analyses of awe as a collective emotion, across 5 studies (N = 2,078) we tested the hypothesis that awe can result in a diminishment of the individual self and its concerns, and increase prosocial behavior. In a representative national sample (Study 1), dispositional tendencies to experience awe predicted greater generosity in an economic game above and beyond other prosocial emotions (e.g., compassion). In follow-up experiments, inductions of awe (relative to various control states) increased ethical decision-making (Study 2), generosity (Study 3), and prosocial values (Study 4). Finally, a naturalistic induction of awe in which participants stood in a grove of towering trees enhanced prosocial helping behavior and decreased entitlement compared to participants in a…
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Marsh AA (2019)reviewMEDLINE-indexed journal, not yet read by usAnnual review of psychology59 citations The Caring Continuum: Evolved Hormonal and Proximal Mechanisms Explain Prosocial and Antisocial Extremes.
Implicit in the long-standing disagreements about whether humans' fundamental nature is predominantly caring or callous is an assumption of uniformity. This article reviews evidence that instead supports inherent variation in caring motivation and behavior. The continuum between prosocial and antisocial extremes reflects variation in the structure and function of neurohormonal systems originally adapted to motivate parental care and since repurposed to support generalized forms of care. Extreme social behaviors such as extraordinary acts of altruism and aggression can often be best understood as reflecting variation in the neural systems that support care. A review of comparative, developmental, and neurobiological research finds consistent evidence that variations in caring motivations and behavior reflect individual differences in sensitivity to cues that signal vulnerability and distr…
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Stochastic evolutionary dynamics of direct reciprocity.
Evolutionary game theory is the study of frequency-dependent selection. The success of an individual depends on the frequencies of strategies that are used in the population. We propose a new model for studying evolutionary dynamics in games with a continuous strategy space. The population size is finite. All members of the population use the same strategy. A mutant strategy is chosen from some distribution over the strategy space. The fixation probability of the mutant strategy in the resident population is calculated. The new mutant takes over the population with this probability. In this case, the mutant becomes the new resident. Otherwise, the existing resident remains. Then, another mutant is generated. These dynamics lead to a stationary distribution over the entire strategy space. Our new approach generalizes classical adaptive dynamics in three ways: (i) the population size is fi…
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Boomsma JJ, Gawne R (2018)reviewMEDLINE-indexed journal, not yet read by usBiological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society149 citations Superorganismality and caste differentiation as points of no return: how the major evolutionary transitions were lost in translation.
More than a century ago, William Morton Wheeler proposed that social insect colonies can be regarded as superorganisms when they have morphologically differentiated reproductive and nursing castes that are analogous to the metazoan germ-line and soma. Following the rise of sociobiology in the 1970s, Wheeler's insights were largely neglected, and we were left with multiple new superorganism concepts that are mutually inconsistent and uninformative on how superorganismality originated. These difficulties can be traced to the broadened sociobiological concept of eusociality, which denies that physical queen-worker caste differentiation is a universal hallmark of superorganismal colonies. Unlike early evolutionary naturalists and geneticists such as Weismann, Huxley, Fisher and Haldane, who set out to explain the acquisition of an unmated worker caste, the goal of sociobiology was to underst…
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Why does the microbiome affect behaviour?
Growing evidence indicates that the mammalian microbiome can affect behaviour, and several symbionts even produce neurotransmitters. One common explanation for these observations is that symbionts have evolved to manipulate host behaviour for their benefit. Here, we evaluate the manipulation hypothesis by applying evolutionary theory to recent work on the gut-brain axis. Although the theory predicts manipulation by symbionts under certain conditions, these appear rarely satisfied by the genetically diverse communities of the mammalian microbiome. Specifically, any symbiont investing its resources to manipulate host behaviour is expected to be outcompeted within the microbiome by strains that do not manipulate and redirect their resources into growth and survival. Moreover, current data provide no clear evidence for manipulation. Instead, we show how behavioural effects can readily arise …
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Eisenberg DT (2011)reviewMEDLINE-indexed journal, not yet read by usAmerican journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council132 citations An evolutionary review of human telomere biology: the thrifty telomere hypothesis and notes on potential adaptive paternal effects.
Telomeres, repetitive DNA sequences found at the ends of linear chromosomes, play a role in regulating cellular proliferation, and shorten with increasing age in proliferating human tissues. The rate of age-related shortening of telomeres is highest early in life and decreases with age. Shortened telomeres are thought to limit the proliferation of cells and are associated with increased morbidity and mortality. Although natural selection is widely assumed to operate against long telomeres because they entail increased cancer risk, the evidence for this is mixed. Instead, here it is proposed that telomere length is primarily limited by energetic constraints. Cell proliferation is energetically expensive, so shorter telomeres should lead to a thrifty phenotype. Shorter telomeres are proposed to restrain adaptive immunity as an energy saving mechanism. Such a limited immune system, however,…
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Evolution of intra-ejaculate sperm interactions: do sperm cooperate?
Sperm are often considered to be individuals, in part because of their unique genetic identities produced as a result of synapsis during meiosis, and in part due to their unique ecology, being ejected away from the soma to continue their existence in a foreign environment. Selection at the level of individual sperm has been suggested to explain the evolution of two enigmatic sperm phenotypes: sperm heteromorphism, where more than one type of sperm is produced by a male, and sperm conjugation, where multiple sperm join together for motility and transport through the female reproductive tract before dissociation prior to fertilization. In sperm heteromorphic species, only one of the sperm morphs typically participates in fertilization, with the non-fertilizing "parasperm" being interpreted as reproductive altruists. Likewise, in species with sperm conjugation, high levels of sperm mortalit…
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