dorsal/arxiv
View SchemaAltruism may arise from individual selection
| Authors | Angel Sanchez, Jose A. Cuesta |
|---|---|
| Categories | |
| ArXiv ID | q-bio/0403023 |
| URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/q-bio/0403023 |
Abstract
The fact that humans cooperate with non-kin in large groups, or with people they will never meet again, is a long-standing evolutionary puzzle with profound implications. Cooperation is linked to altruism, the capacity to perform costly acts that confer benefits on others. Theoretical approaches had so far disregarded costly acts that do not yield future benefits for the altruist, either directly or indirectly. Recently, strong reciprocity, i.e., the predisposition to cooperate with others and to punish non-cooperators at personal cost, has been proposed as a schema for understanding altruism in humans. While behavioral experiments support the existence of strong reciprocity, its evolutionary origins remain unclear: group and cultural selection are generally invoked to compensate for the negative effects that reciprocity is assumed to have on individuals. Here we show, by means of an agent-based model inspired on the Ultimatum Game, that selection acting on individuals capable of other-regarding behavior can give rise to strong reciprocity. The results, consistent with the existence of neural correlates of fairness, are in good agreement with observations on humans and monkeys.
{
"annotation_id": "481a0e55-98b8-47e0-82ac-77724f6bc52f",
"date_created": "2026-03-02T18:01:31.669000Z",
"date_modified": "2026-03-02T18:01:31.669000Z",
"file_hash": "50a96e4b976b3b9db4b0a3f048a0279a0a367e5b0bf63ba2c12c71263df659b0",
"private": false,
"record": {
"abstract": "The fact that humans cooperate with non-kin in large groups, or with people\nthey will never meet again, is a long-standing evolutionary puzzle with\nprofound implications. Cooperation is linked to altruism, the capacity to\nperform costly acts that confer benefits on others. Theoretical approaches had\nso far disregarded costly acts that do not yield future benefits for the\naltruist, either directly or indirectly. Recently, strong reciprocity, i.e.,\nthe predisposition to cooperate with others and to punish non-cooperators at\npersonal cost, has been proposed as a schema for understanding altruism in\nhumans. While behavioral experiments support the existence of strong\nreciprocity, its evolutionary origins remain unclear: group and cultural\nselection are generally invoked to compensate for the negative effects that\nreciprocity is assumed to have on individuals. Here we show, by means of an\nagent-based model inspired on the Ultimatum Game, that selection acting on\nindividuals capable of other-regarding behavior can give rise to strong\nreciprocity. The results, consistent with the existence of neural correlates of\nfairness, are in good agreement with observations on humans and monkeys.",
"arxiv_id": "q-bio/0403023",
"authors": [
"Angel Sanchez",
"Jose A. Cuesta"
],
"categories": [
"q-bio.PE",
"cond-mat.stat-mech",
"nlin.AO",
"physics.bio-ph",
"q-bio.QM"
],
"title": "Altruism may arise from individual selection",
"url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/q-bio/0403023"
},
"schema_id": "dorsal/arxiv",
"source": {
"execution_id": "fcd09629-0464-4a30-9d28-9af6433bd446",
"id": "arXiv Dataset IDs",
"type": "Model",
"variant": "snapshot-2026-03-01",
"version": "0.1.0"
},
"user_id": 1000002
}