Why are people friendly?

[xchrom]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/jan/27/why-are-people-friendly

This week's Nature has a report on how hunter-gatherers co-operate, which shows the way in which the scientific study of altruism has moved on since The Selfish Gene. That book popularised two explanations for our unselfish instincts and behaviour. The first, and nowadays obvious, reason is that it causes genes associated with it to spread: if I am helpful to my relatives, my descendants will have more relatives. The second is Robert Trivers's model of "reciprocal altruism": over time, co-operation pays, and nice guys finish first – providing that they are also sufficiently nasty to the nasty guys.

Both these explanations still hold, but they are not enough, by themselves or in combination, to explain all of the co-operation and friendliness that we actually see in humans. To do this, it is necessary to move up from purely individual attributes to consider the ways in which these attributes are shaped by the groups that we form.

Without selection between competing groups, the advantages of co-operation are not great enough to make it spread, or maintain itself within a population. Our benevolent instincts are the products of our social nature, and to analyse human society as essentially an association of individuals is not just morally but scientifically wrong, since that kind of analysis doesn't predict our behaviour accurately.

The researchers for the Nature report studied 205 members of the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer bushman group who "represent possibly one of the most extreme departures from life in industrialised societies, and they remain relatively isolated from modern cultural influences". But the essentials of what they found were also revealed by studies of modernised societies, suggesting that the way we form friendship networks is common across all humanity.

[lumberjack_jeff]

1. "...the best place for [an Eskimo] to store his surplus is in someone else's stomach."

http://www.nonzero.org/chap2.htm

[NMDemDist2]

2. this article didn't tell me a thing

except that tall people have more friends

i was looking to see why i was friendly, but they didn't give me anything

[tama]

3. Was also disappointed

Bushman's are interesting people, their languages are usually considered 'relics' from earlier period of linguistic evolution, they have longest unbroken cultural evolution - the meanings of their rock paintings dating back even hundreds of thousands years are still known to contemporary people. Also according to sources 40% of the population goes through shamanic initiation.

[Jim__]

4. The article in the LA Times makes it clearer, group selection allows altruism to win out.

The article in the guardian is making this point, but it doesn't tie it back to the study. The story (http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-ancient-social-networks-20120126,0,3621864.story) in the LA Times is better at tying it back to the research paper.

An excerpt:

...

Natural selection would dictate that free riders in a community — those selfish individuals who take advantage of other people's generosity — would outcompete their more selfless brethren. Social networks may have been very useful in making sure that the cooperative individuals were able to work together successfully.

Recent work linking genetic variation to social network structure lent further credence to the idea that social networks may have evolved for purposes of survival. For instance, scientists have found that the social networks of identical twins are more similar than those of fraternal twins, suggesting that genes play a role.

...

When the researchers put this information together, they found that Hadza who contributed more to the common good were more likely to be friends with other cooperative people. These connections formed clusters that were often near the center of the social networks. That, in turn, made the group more successful and better able to compete with other groups for scarce resources, Christakis said.

...