Altruistically Inclined?: The Behavioral Sciences, Evolutionary Theory, and the Origins of Reciprocity (review)

According to Field who is an economist, from the very beginning, research on humans subjects playing games have shown that humans behave altruistically more than is rational (in the strong sense of personal, material self-interest). In one-shot or repeated prisoner's dilemma games of fixed and known duration, people commonly, but irrationally, fail to defect first. In a variety of contexts, both experimental and historical, they refrain from harm and from massive retaliation, show a willingness to punish cheaters in the public interest and so on. As John Nash complained in a note to the first experimenters when learning of their results, "I would have thought them (the subjects) more rational". Field wants his fellow economists, and rational choice theorists generally, to face up to the fact that they are struggling with a paradigm in crisis. He makes a weaker attempt to also address the "sociological/anthropological tradition". (They say the explanation is the norms of culture and social organization but where did these come from?). Field's solution is for both kinds of social scientists to fall back on biological evolutionary theory, but on group rather than individual selection. It is mildly embarrassing for his theory that people are also rather irrational in non-gaming situations dealing with statistical inference as shown by the other experimental economics tradition which garnered this year's Nobel prize. This can have nothing to do with altruism or group selection so a grab bag of explanations for those results are proffered.

Despite being somewhat repetitive, this book was a pleasure to read. Given the premises, it is unfailingly logical and to the best of my knowledge technically correct in its treatment of the experimental gaming literature and the trait-group selection model. It also reflects a wide, careful and thoughtful reading of many literatures and there would be few readers who would not learn something new from it. However, I have a problem with some of Field's premises. First, he adopts single play or repeat but fixed-duration p.d. as the "canonical" form of strategic interaction. However, all organisms have life cycles. In none of these, even those that come closest such as annual plants and insects, is the exact length of those life cycles predictable down to the day, the hour, the minute. The same obtains for the length of genetic lineages. Hence for organisms living in social groups, repeated interactions of unknown duration, whether within or through generations, are the rule. Moreover, the very characteristic at issue, when thought of as a tendency to be more friendly than fearful (fearful, rather than aggressive as Field tends to think of it), is likely to bring cooperators into interaction with each other. This is all important because, as Field emphasizes, cooperation (mutual advantage) can sustain positive social relationships once cooperators become common, but he is convinced altruism (self-sacrifice) among non-kin, and hence group selection, is logically necessary to establish them in the first place.

Secondly, he implicitly assumes that intraspecific predation rather than parasitism is the canonical form of social conflict. To be sure, future benefits are irrelevant if failure to defect at the first opportunity means you are dead — except that usually you are not. Just as theft arises more commonly in human societies than does murder, intraspecific parasitism of many kinds including food theft (kleptoparasitism) and dumping eggs in others' nests to rear arise more commonly in animal societies than does cannibalism say. Thirdly with asymmetrical interactions, he thinks establishing a double coincidence of needs is very unlikely. However, it happens with respect to wants millions of times a day in human societies with market economies. Multiple ecological niches and the numerous trade-offs in biological life histories including those of early humans provide plentiful opportunities for specialization and exchange. To be sure the advantage is more in the getting than the giving or letting have, and to...