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The co-evolution of culturally inherited altruistic helping and cultural transmission under random group formation

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  • Lehmann, Laurent
  • Feldman, Marcus W.

Abstract

Limited migration results in kin selective pressure on helping behaviors under a wide range of ecological, demographic and life-history situations. However, such genetically determined altruistic helping can evolve only when migration is not too strong and group size is not too large. Cultural inheritance of helping behaviors may allow altruistic helping to evolve in groups of larger size because cultural transmission has the potential to markedly decrease the variance within groups and augment the variance between groups. Here, we study the co-evolution of culturally inherited altruistic helping behaviors and two alternative cultural transmission rules for such behaviors. We find that conformist transmission, where individuals within groups tend to copy prevalent cultural variants (e.g., beliefs or values), has a strong adverse effect on the evolution of culturally inherited helping traits. This finding is at variance with the commonly held view that conformist transmission is a crucial factor favoring the evolution of altruistic helping in humans. By contrast, we find that under one-to-many transmission, where individuals within groups tend to copy a “leader†(or teacher), altruistic helping can evolve in groups of any size, although the cultural transmission rule itself hitchhikes rather weakly with a selected helping trait. Our results suggest that culturally determined helping behaviors are more likely to be driven by “leaders†than by popularity, but the emergence and stability of the cultural transmission rules themselves should be driven by some extrinsic factors.

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  • Lehmann, Laurent & Feldman, Marcus W., 2008. "The co-evolution of culturally inherited altruistic helping and cultural transmission under random group formation," Theoretical Population Biology, Elsevier, vol. 73(4), pages 506-516.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:thpobi:v:73:y:2008:i:4:p:506-516
    DOI: 10.1016/j.tpb.2008.02.004
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Vincent A. A. Jansen & Minus van Baalen, 2006. "Altruism through beard chromodynamics," Nature, Nature, vol. 440(7084), pages 663-666, March.
    2. Ken Binmore, 2006. "Why do people cooperate?," Politics, Philosophy & Economics, , vol. 5(1), pages 81-96, February.
    3. Henrich, Joseph, 2004. "Cultural group selection, coevolutionary processes and large-scale cooperation," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 53(1), pages 3-35, January.
    4. Hisashi Ohtsuki & Christoph Hauert & Erez Lieberman & Martin A. Nowak, 2006. "A simple rule for the evolution of cooperation on graphs and social networks," Nature, Nature, vol. 441(7092), pages 502-505, May.
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    Cited by:

    1. Alberto Micheletti, 2020. "Modelling cultural selection on biological fitness to integrate social transmission and adaptive explanations for human behaviour," Post-Print hal-02563204, HAL.
    2. Denton, Kaleda K. & Ram, Yoav & Feldman, Marcus W., 2022. "Conformity and content-biased cultural transmission in the evolution of altruism," Theoretical Population Biology, Elsevier, vol. 143(C), pages 52-61.
    3. Ozgur Aydogmus & Hasan Cagatay & Erkan Gürpinar, 2020. "Does social learning promote cooperation in social dilemmas?," Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination, Springer;Society for Economic Science with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents, vol. 15(3), pages 633-648, July.
    4. Robin Watson & Thomas J. H. Morgan & Rachel L. Kendal & Julie Van de Vyver & Jeremy Kendal, 2021. "Social Learning Strategies and Cooperative Behaviour: Evidence of Payoff Bias, but Not Prestige or Conformity, in a Social Dilemma Game," Games, MDPI, vol. 12(4), pages 1-26, November.

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