The target article by Baumard et al., like almost all current research and theory on how altruism develops from originally selfish motives, treats the acquisition of altruism solely as an evolutionary process occurring over the history of the species (biological evolution). According to these theories, people are born with altruistic tendencies or with the propensity to value fairness. However, if learning over a person's lifetime (behavioral evolution) were analogous to evolution over the history of the species (Baum Reference Baum1994; Staddon & Simmelhag Reference Staddon and Simmelhag1971), selfish people might learn to be altruistic by analogous mechanisms. Behavioral evolution would act on groups (or patterns) of an individual's actions over time just as biological evolution acts on groups of individuals over social space.
The relation of biological evolution of altruism to behavioral evolution of altruism becomes clear if a person's altruism is thought of not in terms of any act alone, but rather in terms of the act in the context of a pattern of altruistic acts extended over time. Outside of such a pattern, an individual altruistic act might be accidental or part of a pattern of calculated or manipulative selfish behavior. Only in the context of a consistent pattern of altruistic behavior should an individual act be considered altruistic. (The apparent one-shot games of laboratory experiments should be seen in the context of the stream of everyday-life situations that the games are intended to model.) Even though every individual act of altruism is by definition costly to the actor, an overall altruistic pattern may be highly valuable (Rachlin Reference Rachlin2002). What we inherit through biological evolution would be the capacity to highly value (and repeat) such patterns. This sort of situation – a high-valued pattern consisting of individually low-valued or costly acts – is exactly that of most self-control problems in everyday life (Rachlin Reference Rachlin2000). For example, most alcoholics prefer to be sober, healthy, socially accepted, and to perform well at their jobs rather than to be drunk all the time, unhealthy, socially rejected, and perform poorly at their jobs. But, over the next few minutes, they prefer to have a drink than to not have one. If, over successive brief intervals, an alcoholic always does what she prefers at the moment, she will always be drinking.
An individual altruistic act is by definition costly to the actor, yet a pattern of altruistic acts may be highly valuable. The difficulty of putting together a pattern of self-controlled acts is like the difficulty of always following the golden rule. Indeed there is a significant (though small) correlation, across people, between the slopes of delay discount functions (measures of self-control) and the slopes of social discount functions (measures of altruism) (Rachlin & Jones Reference Rachlin and Jones2008). We are not saying that altruism is merely a form of self-control. The reverse may well be the case. It just seems to us that one evolutionary mechanism can explain both types of situations.
What must be acquired for both altruism and self-control is the ability to ignore the case-by-case (low) value of individual (altruistic or self-controlled) acts and to string together a pattern of acts which, if they were isolated, would not be performed. Such learning is not simple or easy. Cultural evolution within a society may create institutions that place restrictions on adults as well as children's choices as a sort of scaffold or crutch to bring behavior into line with valuable patterns. As we get older, we learn to string together wider and wider patterns. These become “functionally autonomous” not because they are simply repeated, not because they are extrinsically reinforced (although they may be), but because they are intrinsically reinforcing. We inherit their tendency to be so. Learning to behave morally is like learning to enjoy reading stories rather than jokes, or listening to symphonies rather than tunes. Plato, in The Republic, said that music and gymnastics were the two most important components of a child's education. Perhaps his high esteem for both was due to their common emphasis on temporal patterning.
Reduction of the range of possible partners in social groups by expulsion of defectors, the target article's proposed mechanism underlying altruism, has a parallel in self-control – the reduction of choice opportunities by means of pre-commitment; commitment eliminates impulsive acts from an upcoming pattern of acts. Recent experiments on self-control in our laboratory (Locey & Rachlin, in press) show that people will pay to avoid future “tempting” small immediate rewards, thereby committing themselves to, and obtaining, a higher reward rate overall.
We have no criticism of the mutualism mechanism presented in the target article (although the argument would have been clearer if the role of group selection in the proposed evolutionary model were discussed). But we do criticize the article's tendency, common in much modern evolutionary as well as cognitive psychology, to reify and internalize behavioral patterns. In the target article, the crucial second step in the evolution of morality is said to be: “the selection of a disposition to be intrinsically motivated to be fair” (sect. 2.2.1, para. 12). But what is the difference between intrinsic motivation to be fair and a consistent pattern of fairness? If they were different (a person with the requisite intrinsic motivation might not have the requisite understanding of the needs and desires of others and thus inadvertently act unfairly), then who would the social group reject – the consistently fair person or the one with the intrinsic motivation to be fair (whatever that might mean) but who nevertheless sometimes or perhaps often acted unfairly?
Consistent cooperation may arise from rule following (which in turn requires behavior that seems at the moment to be foolish or costly). And, the tendency to follow a rule in such cases (rather than make decisions based on momentary inclinations) may come in turn from understanding one's own limitations (i.e., from a history of reinforcement for rule-following and punishment for case-by-case, seat-of-the pants decision making). Such a learning model would apply to moral rules as well as to personal rules of self-control.
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The target article by Baumard et al., like almost all current research and theory on how altruism develops from originally selfish motives, treats the acquisition of altruism solely as an evolutionary process occurring over the history of the species (biological evolution). According to these theories, people are born with altruistic tendencies or with the propensity to value fairness. However, if learning over a person's lifetime (behavioral evolution) were analogous to evolution over the history of the species (Baum Reference Baum1994; Staddon & Simmelhag Reference Staddon and Simmelhag1971), selfish people might learn to be altruistic by analogous mechanisms. Behavioral evolution would act on groups (or patterns) of an individual's actions over time just as biological evolution acts on groups of individuals over social space.
The relation of biological evolution of altruism to behavioral evolution of altruism becomes clear if a person's altruism is thought of not in terms of any act alone, but rather in terms of the act in the context of a pattern of altruistic acts extended over time. Outside of such a pattern, an individual altruistic act might be accidental or part of a pattern of calculated or manipulative selfish behavior. Only in the context of a consistent pattern of altruistic behavior should an individual act be considered altruistic. (The apparent one-shot games of laboratory experiments should be seen in the context of the stream of everyday-life situations that the games are intended to model.) Even though every individual act of altruism is by definition costly to the actor, an overall altruistic pattern may be highly valuable (Rachlin Reference Rachlin2002). What we inherit through biological evolution would be the capacity to highly value (and repeat) such patterns. This sort of situation – a high-valued pattern consisting of individually low-valued or costly acts – is exactly that of most self-control problems in everyday life (Rachlin Reference Rachlin2000). For example, most alcoholics prefer to be sober, healthy, socially accepted, and to perform well at their jobs rather than to be drunk all the time, unhealthy, socially rejected, and perform poorly at their jobs. But, over the next few minutes, they prefer to have a drink than to not have one. If, over successive brief intervals, an alcoholic always does what she prefers at the moment, she will always be drinking.
An individual altruistic act is by definition costly to the actor, yet a pattern of altruistic acts may be highly valuable. The difficulty of putting together a pattern of self-controlled acts is like the difficulty of always following the golden rule. Indeed there is a significant (though small) correlation, across people, between the slopes of delay discount functions (measures of self-control) and the slopes of social discount functions (measures of altruism) (Rachlin & Jones Reference Rachlin and Jones2008). We are not saying that altruism is merely a form of self-control. The reverse may well be the case. It just seems to us that one evolutionary mechanism can explain both types of situations.
What must be acquired for both altruism and self-control is the ability to ignore the case-by-case (low) value of individual (altruistic or self-controlled) acts and to string together a pattern of acts which, if they were isolated, would not be performed. Such learning is not simple or easy. Cultural evolution within a society may create institutions that place restrictions on adults as well as children's choices as a sort of scaffold or crutch to bring behavior into line with valuable patterns. As we get older, we learn to string together wider and wider patterns. These become “functionally autonomous” not because they are simply repeated, not because they are extrinsically reinforced (although they may be), but because they are intrinsically reinforcing. We inherit their tendency to be so. Learning to behave morally is like learning to enjoy reading stories rather than jokes, or listening to symphonies rather than tunes. Plato, in The Republic, said that music and gymnastics were the two most important components of a child's education. Perhaps his high esteem for both was due to their common emphasis on temporal patterning.
Reduction of the range of possible partners in social groups by expulsion of defectors, the target article's proposed mechanism underlying altruism, has a parallel in self-control – the reduction of choice opportunities by means of pre-commitment; commitment eliminates impulsive acts from an upcoming pattern of acts. Recent experiments on self-control in our laboratory (Locey & Rachlin, in press) show that people will pay to avoid future “tempting” small immediate rewards, thereby committing themselves to, and obtaining, a higher reward rate overall.
We have no criticism of the mutualism mechanism presented in the target article (although the argument would have been clearer if the role of group selection in the proposed evolutionary model were discussed). But we do criticize the article's tendency, common in much modern evolutionary as well as cognitive psychology, to reify and internalize behavioral patterns. In the target article, the crucial second step in the evolution of morality is said to be: “the selection of a disposition to be intrinsically motivated to be fair” (sect. 2.2.1, para. 12). But what is the difference between intrinsic motivation to be fair and a consistent pattern of fairness? If they were different (a person with the requisite intrinsic motivation might not have the requisite understanding of the needs and desires of others and thus inadvertently act unfairly), then who would the social group reject – the consistently fair person or the one with the intrinsic motivation to be fair (whatever that might mean) but who nevertheless sometimes or perhaps often acted unfairly?
Consistent cooperation may arise from rule following (which in turn requires behavior that seems at the moment to be foolish or costly). And, the tendency to follow a rule in such cases (rather than make decisions based on momentary inclinations) may come in turn from understanding one's own limitations (i.e., from a history of reinforcement for rule-following and punishment for case-by-case, seat-of-the pants decision making). Such a learning model would apply to moral rules as well as to personal rules of self-control.