Reciprocal Altruism and Psychological Sources of Will and its Impact on Soldiers Preparedness

Paper presented at ICAMP - 2011

Altruistic behavior is that behavior which benefits other organism.  If a person jumps into water at some danger to himself to save another distantly related human being from drowning it may be considered as an act of altruistic behavior.  But if a person leaps into water to save his own child, the behavior would not be considered as an instance of “altruism” because the person is contributing to the survival of his own gemes invested in the child.  There are several factors that favors the exchange of altruistic behaviors.  Long-lifetime of individuals of a species maximizes the chance that any two individuals will encounter many altruistic situations and instances of reciprocal altruism in long-lived species.  All other things being equal interdependence of members of a species increases the possibility to keep individuals near each other and encounter of altruistic situations also increases.  Aid in combat in which a dominance oriented species is aided in aggressive encounters with other individuals by help from a less dominant individual.  The relationship between two individuals repeatedly exposed to symmetrical reciprocal situations is analogous to what game theorists call the prisoner’s dilemma (Luce and Raiffa, 1957, Rapoport and Chammah, 1965) which is characterized by payoff.

            Reciprocal altruism can also be viewed as a symbiosis each partner helping the other while he helps himself.  Reciprocal altruism is a common behavior that takes place across cultures and contexts.  Any act that means small cost to the giver and greater benefit to the taker may be called as an act of altruism and its list may contain following types of behavior:

(i)                Helping in times of danger (e.g. accidents, predation, aggression)

(ii)             Sharing food

(iii)           Helping the sick, the wounded or the very young and old

(iv)            Sharing implements and knowledge

Anthropologists have recognized the importance of reciprocity in human behavior, but when they have done so in terms of group benefits, reciprocity cementing group relations and encouraging group survival.  The individual sacrifices so that group may benefit.  The term reciprocity refers to giving and taking without the use of money: it ranges from pure gift giving to equalized barter and to self-interested cheating.  In other words, reciprocity may take three forms generalized reciprocity, balanced reciprocity and negative reciprocity.  Generalized reciprocity is gift giving without any immediate returns or conscious thought of return.  Each thing in nature provides something without expecting an equal or immediate return.  In balanced reciprocity, the exchange is usually motivated by desire or need for certain objects.  Negative reciprocity is an attempt to take advantage of another for one’s own self-interest.  The human altruistic system is a sensitive and unstable one: Individuals will differ not in being altruists and cheaters but in the degree of altruism they show and in the conditions under which they will cheat.  Sawyer (1966) has shown that all groups in all experimental situations tested showed more altruistic behavior toward friends than toward neutral individuals.  Much of human aggression has moral overtones.  Injustice, unfairness and lack of reciprocity often motivate human aggression and indignation.  A behavior is to said to be altruistic in the evolutionary sense of that term if it involves a fitness cost to the donor and centers a fitness benefit on the recipient.  Evolutionary altruism describes the fitness effects of a behavior not the thoughts or feelings, if any, that prompt individuals to produce those behaviors.  In contrast psychological altruism concerns the motives that cause a behavior, not its actual effects.  In the Descent of Man Darwin (1871) discusses the behavior of courageous men who risk their lives to defend their tribes when a war occurs.  George C. William (1966) in his book Adaptation and National Selection proposed that traits evolve because they promote the replication of genes.  W.D. Hamilton published a paper in 1964, which explains that the classical notion of Darwinian fitness – an organisms prospects of reproductive success – can explain virtually none of the helping behavior we see in nature.  It can explain parental care, but when individuals help individuals who are not their offspring, a new concept of fitness is needed to explain why.  This led Hamilton to introduce the mathematical concept of inclusive fitness.  The point of this concept was to show how keeping a relative and helping one’s offspring can be brought under the same theoretical umbrella: both evolve because they enhance the donor’s inclusive fitness.  Many biologists conclude that helping behavior directed at relatives is therefore an instance of selfishness not altruism.  Helping offspring and helping kin are both in one’s genetic self-interest, because both allow copies of one’s genes to make their way into the next generation.  Motivational pluralism involved in acts of self-sacrifice when a soldier throws himself on a grenade to save the lives of their comrades or citizen’s can be explained on the basis of a systematic understanding.  Batson’s (1991) empathy-altruism hypothesis asserts that empathy causes people to have altruistic ultimate desires.  Phenomena that require discussion and research on altruism is generated by acts of apathy and acts of dramatic altruists.  Biblatane and John Darley, among others, attempted to bring this phenomenon into laboratory to determine the varieties that affect the likelihood of intervention.  There are instances of charity actions, people helping more in small towns than big cities and sometimes people’s apathy when a person is beaten and dozen’s of neighbor’s look on from their apartments.  Altruism is still the predominant mode in most of the societies.  In the contemporary context where attitude of individualism is on the ascendant, psychological egoism is on the rise when most our activities are self-directed it becomes all the more necessary to identity the common grounds that connect us with a feeling of belongingness with our follow citizens.  There are individual differences in the acts of altruism.  Human parents vary, some take better care of their children than others, and some even abuse and kill their offspring.  Given this multitude of possibilities, how might one predict how altruism will evolve? Three principles are relevant-availability, reliability and efficiency.  Natural selection acts only on the range of variation that exists ancestrally.  Helping, comforting, sharing and co-operating occur among acquaintances and strangers but how this devotion to the interest of others is affected needs a closer scrutiny.  One variable that is positively related to altruism and other forms of pro-social behavior is self-esteem.  If one is sure of oneself, it seems easier to extend oneself to others.  However there are exceptions to this generalization.  People with an extremely high opinion of themselves may feel no need to be connected to others and people with a low opinion of themselves may be helpful just to garner social support.  In political domain, there is some evidence that liberals score higher than conservatives on tests of moral reasoning.  Daniel Batson and colleagues distinguished among religious people those who see religion as a means to extrinsic ends, those who see it as an end in itself and those who see it us a quest.  Only among people in the latter group was helping positively related to religiosity.  Altruistic acts are also affected by group identification in which people are more inclined to help those who are perceived as similar to themselves than those who are perceived as different.  The assumption of troika factors of individualism, atomism and egoism plays a great deal in the development of altruism.  In an influential account of development of altruism Martin Hoffman suggests that altruism has two requirements one affective and cognitive.  Genuine altruism requires empathy (affective) and perspective taking (cognitive).  Although home and family is the central domain for socialization in childhood but much socialization occurs outside home-setting.  Cooperative learning and play-settings in the class-room seem to enhance the children’s perspective taking abilities.  Conversely, explicitly competitive class-room situations seem to reduce prosocial effects.  There are also some evidences that in addition to providing opportunities for cooperation and schools can facilitate altruism by putting children into mixed age groups.  According to Amartya Sen to act out of commitment is to do what one thinks is right, what will promote public welfare, quite part from whether it promotes one’s own.  It is to act out of a sense of responsibility as a citizen.  This include doing one’s job to the best of one’s ability – going beyond the terms of the contract even if no one is watching and there is nothing to be gained from it.

It is pertinent to note that how our soldier’s derive their will-power to act in difficult circumstances of physical, social and geographical adversities.  In the social attributional realm, too, consistency is evident in the inclination perceivers have to attribute causality for behaviors to people whose personalities are seen as consistent with the behaviors (Jones & Davis, 1965).  The principle of consistency in the experience of will draws on the observation that the thoughts that serve as potential causes of action typically have semantic associations with the actions.  A thought that is perceived to cause an act is after the name of the act or an image of its stimulus execution or consequence (Wallabher & Wegner, 19855).

A basic principle of causal inference is what we tend to discount the causal influence of one potential cause if there are other available (Kelly, 1972, McClure, 1998).  The causes that complete with thoughts are of two kinds – internal and external.  The plausible internal causes for an action might include one’s emotions, habits, traits or other unconscious action tendencies.  Plausible external causes for an action might include other people or external forces that impinge on us even when we are thinking of action in advance.  The extensive contemporary literature on causal attribution in social situations (e.g. Gilbert, 1995) has suggested the presence of others and of situational forces provides an intricate causal context that could influence the individual’s experience of will in a variety of ways.  The experience of will can be an indication that mind is causing action, if the person is a good self-interpreter.  Believing that our conscious thoughts cause our action may not be always true and research suggest a fundamental role for automatic processes in everyday behavior (Bargh, 1997).  In fact, the mental systems, that introduces thoughts of action to mind and keeps them coordinated with the actions is itself an intriguing mechanism.

The processes underlying factors altruism and conscious experience of will power are far more important attributes that can give rise to actions necessary for soldiers preparedness.  Self-attention may indeed be associated with perceived control or responsibility for action (Gibbons, 1990) but this effect is a general feature of a specific process.  This specific process is the perception of a causal link between one’s own thought and action.  It makes sense that we tend to see ourselves as the authors of an act primarily when we had experienced relevant thoughts about the act at an appropriate interval in advance, and so could infer that our own mental processes had set the act in motion.  Actions we perform that are not presaged in our minds, in turn, would appear not to be caused by our minds, in essence, then this view suggests a connection between what Michotte (1963) identified as the two forms of conscious evidence we have for the causality of self in action.  The first is our ability to foresee the result before it actually takes place, the second the presence of a feeling of activity.  There is a need to focus such behavior aspects which is not at the center of traditional approaches of military psychology.  There is much more important reason to diversify our research in military psychology to explore inclinations of altruism and psychological forces of experience of will power that may go a long way to go beyond our traditional attempts to understand military psychology.  In human cultural life, however, there is sometimes a trade off between short-term and long-term goals, and much of the success of the human species is based on our ability to sacrifice short-term goals for the long-term ones, as in delay of gratification (Mischel & Ayduk, 2004).  Psychological experience of will power may be most useful in fostering the pursuit of enlightened self-interest.  Psychologists can explore and elucidate the factors that underlie the processes of altruism and psychological experience of will power that may have enormous significance to better and more conducive behavior patterns among the military personnels.