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Review
. 2016 Feb 5;371(1687):20150097.
doi: 10.1098/rstb.2015.0097.

The evolution of altruistic social preferences in human groups

Joan B Silk  1 , Bailey R House  2
Affiliations
Review

The evolution of altruistic social preferences in human groups

Joan B Silk et al. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. .

Abstract

In this paper, we consider three hypotheses to account for the evolution of the extraordinary capacity for large-scale cooperation and altruistic social preferences within human societies. One hypothesis is that human cooperation is built on the same evolutionary foundations as cooperation in other animal societies, and that fundamental elements of the social preferences that shape our species' cooperative behaviour are also shared with other closely related primates. Another hypothesis is that selective pressures favouring cooperative breeding have shaped the capacity for cooperation and the development of social preferences, and produced a common set of behavioural dispositions and social preferences in cooperatively breeding primates and humans. The third hypothesis is that humans have evolved derived capacities for collaboration, group-level cooperation and altruistic social preferences that are linked to our capacity for culture. We draw on naturalistic data to assess differences in the form, scope and scale of cooperation between humans and other primates, experimental data to evaluate the nature of social preferences across primate species, and comparative analyses to evaluate the evolutionary origins of cooperative breeding and related forms of behaviour.

Keywords: altruism; cooperation; social preferences.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
(a,b) Mean (and s.e.) of allomaternal care and prosociality scores for species categorized as socially monogamous, cooperatively breeding and polygynous. (Based on data from [62] provided by J. Burkart 2015, personal communication.)
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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