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5.4

At the root of Altruism is Selfishness - True or False?

Asked by sftweng in Philosophy & Religion

Tags: altruism, true

In the mathematical discipline called "Games Theory", there is a subject titled "The Prisoner's Dilemma". It's fundamental to the use of the jargon phrase "a win-win situation". That is, it focuses on what are called "non-zero-sum" games.

I won't go into it here but I will expect that respondents will either understand the issues from prior reading or will have done some Googling and reading before responding.

One of the bizarre conclusions I've come to in looking at simulations that were done for the "Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma" showed that some of the most successful strategies were of the "Tit-for-tat" variety and that if a population had previously been seeded with Tit-for-Tat players then the most successful strategy was Forgiving Tit-for-Tat. This led to the conclusion that a visibly selfish strategy (Tit-for-Tat and its variants) were the root and pragmatic cause for altruism, as society developed.

Tit-for-Tat is essentially an "Eye-for-an-Eye" strategy but forgiving Tit-for-Tat occasionally "forgives" a reneging opponent. The surprising effect is that by taking this approach, both the individual player and the population as a whole maximize the benefit, if the non-zero-sum "payoff" matrices approximate real-life situations.

Here's what I'm looking for to distribute points (I'll share them among what I regard as the best answers):

1. demonstrate that you know what I'm talking about, either directly or through URL references

2. either describe to me or point me to (again a web URL) any studies in real human behaviour (perhaps sociological or anthropological) that either support or refute the title assertion that selfishness (in a set of non-zero sum interactions) leads to altruism, i.e., mutual benefit.

3. alternatively, demonstrate convincingly that it's all just a load of bull or that I've made fatally wrong assumptions.

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20091118-EE-VQP-93

At the root of Altruism is Selfishness - True or False?

Asked by sftweng in Philosophy & Religion

Tags: altruism, true

About this solution