Altruism

Altruism is the opposite of selfishness, it is the selflessness concern for the well being of others. How or why did such behavior evolve? Let’s consider reciprocal altruism, it is the idea of helping someone else at a cost to the individual or organism performing the act. Such behavior most likely evolved because the benefits from helping someone else outweighed the cost, for example, the individual or organism that was helped could have performed an altruistic act towards the individual whom helped him earlier. There are several examples of organism that perform reciprocal altruistic acts such as vampire bats who will shared some of the blood they obtain with another bat that was unsuccessful at finding food. Another example can be found in meercats, they perform altruistic acts by taking care of unrelated young meercats while the parents and the rest of the pack goes out to look for food or by staying on the look-out for predators while the rest look for food. With the previous examples in mind, let us change gears and think about the prisoner’s dilemma.

The prisoner’s dilemma deals with the interaction between two individuals and whether they choose to cooperate or defect. If both individuals cooperate, they both obtain a reasonable benefit or payoff. If one of them cooperates and the other defects, one of them gets a better payoff than the previous mutualistic act but the other gets a very low payoff or benefit. If both individuals defect, they both received a fairly bad payoff. Can it be solved? As Dawkins explained on chapter 12 of the selfish gene, the best move is always to defect. If two rational individuals are involved in such interaction, it is more logical to defect (due to lack of trust on the other individual) and received the less harsher payoff or punishment, even when they both could get a reasonable payoff if only both would cooperate. There lies the idea of the prisoner’s dilemma.