Is Strong Reciprocity a Maladaptation? On the Evolutionary Foundations of Human Altruism

Ernst Fehr and Joseph Henrich ()
Additional contact information
Joseph Henrich: Harvard University

No 712, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: In recent years a large number of experimental studies have documented the existence of strong reciprocity among humans. Strong reciprocity means that people willingly repay gifts and punish the violation of cooperation and fairness norms even in anonymous one-shot encounters with genetically unrelated strangers. We provide ethnographic and experimental evidence suggesting that ultimate theories of kin selection, reciprocal altruism, costly signalling and indirect reciprocity do not provide satisfactory evolutionary explanations of strong reciprocity. The problem of these theories is that they can rationalize strong reciprocity only if it is viewed as maladaptive behavior whereas the evidence suggests that it is an adaptive trait. Thus, we conclude that alternative evolutionary approaches are needed to provide ultimate accounts of strong reciprocity.

Keywords: human altruism; evolutionary foundations; maladaptation; reciprocity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 C70 C91 C92 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2003-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-gth and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (33)

Published - published in: P. Hammerstein (ed.), Genetic and Cultural Evolution of Cooperation, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp712.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Is Strong Reciprocity a Maladaptation? On the Evolutionary Foundations of Human Altruism (2003)
Working Paper: Is Strong Reciprocity a Maladaption? On the Evolutionary Foundations of Human Altruism (2003)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp712

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().