In this blog post, we will look at the reasons why humans help others beyond their instinctive selfishness and the process by which communication promotes altruism.
Have you ever seen someone around you who lives for others rather than themselves? Most parents would be the ones in question, even if you didn’t look far. If humans are selfish beings that instinctively prioritize their own interests as rational beings, then the behavior of such parents may seem strange. But in fact, we all accept the behavior of such parents very naturally. Not only parents, but also firefighters who save others in emergency situations, medical staff who work day and night in hospitals, or volunteers who work to help the socially vulnerable, devote themselves to others beyond their own interests. Such altruistic behavior creates social bonds and motivates people to willingly work for others, and we are moved by such behavior and sometimes reflect on the value of life.
One of the many hypotheses that explain this altruistic behavior is the “kin selection hypothesis.” This hypothesis interprets altruistic behavior from the perspective that caring for children with one’s own genes is a survival strategy to pass on one’s genes to future generations. In other words, a parent’s devotion can be understood as part of an effort to continue one’s gene lineage. From this logic, altruistic acts are ultimately interpreted as being for oneself. Similarly, the “altruism hypothesis” explains that people act altruistically in the hope that they will be helped by the people they have helped in the future. As a result, most hypotheses that explain altruistic behavior take the view that it is possible because acting for others ultimately benefits oneself.
However, this hypothesis does not fully explain situations in which helping others does not bring any physical benefits, such as when people who have lost their way in the mountains share the little water they have, or when people help each other in a desperate situation. Such extreme altruistic behavior leaves us with questions. The “communication hypothesis” is a hypothesis that explains these situations. According to this hypothesis, simply sharing thoughts and communicating intentions through conversation is enough to make a person put aside their own selfishness and make a decision to be considerate of others. The communication hypothesis shows how important human social nature and emotional interaction are.
One study to prove the communication hypothesis is the commons game experiment led by Professor Juan Camilo Cárdenas of the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. The commons is a resource that is jointly owned by everyone, like a pasture, but if someone uses it excessively, it becomes unavailable to others. Professor Cardenas divided 65 university students and 40 farmers into teams of five to conduct an experiment similar to a commons by creating a hypothetical situation. In this experiment, each participant was allowed to harvest resources, and the more resources they harvested, the more they were paid, but the fewer resources there were for the whole team, which resulted in a disadvantage for other people. This choice of using these resources has created a dilemma as to whether to take more resources for personal gain or to save resources for the benefit of the whole.
Before looking at the results of the experiment, it is beneficial to take more resources to maximize one’s reward regardless of how much resources others take. However, in the actual experimental results, the participants collected fewer resources than expected. At this point, Professor Cardenas designed two additional experiments to examine the effect of communication on altruistic behavior. In the first experiment, the participants were in a situation where they could not communicate at all, and in the second experiment, they were in a situation where they could share their thoughts with each other through conversation once in the middle or at the end of each game.
In the communicative experiment, the team members reached an agreement to use fewer resources, and the amount of resources collected decreased significantly. This suggests that humans have the ability to promote the interests of the community through conversation with others. These results show that conversation can act as an important factor in inducing altruistic behavior, beyond simply being a means of communication between individuals.
Through these experiments, we have learned that communication hypothesis can have a significant impact on human altruistic choice. However, it is difficult to say that all altruistic acts are caused by communication. For example, people who anonymously donate large sums of money to hospitals or sponsor a certain amount of money every month to African refugees they do not know at all perform altruistic acts without going through the communication process. In this regard, some scholars question the communication hypothesis, sometimes even calling it “cheap talk.” Nevertheless, it is difficult to deny that communication is an important means in many cases to form a sense of solidarity with others and to promote the interests of the group by regulating individual selfish desires.
We were able to confirm through the commons experiment that communication can play a role in triggering altruistic behavior. People make altruistic decisions through interactions with others, even if they are only verbal promises, which can ultimately contribute to the stability and sustainability of society as a whole.
