Reciprocal Altruism

Rooted in evolutionary biology and multi-iteration game theory, reciprocal altruism is a cooperative strategy in which someone chooses to perform an act that incurs an immediate net personal cost to benefit another individual in the hope of reaping a future gain. In biological terms, it represents a willingness to forego one's own reproductive chances in favor of another's chances for the overall benefit of the group. This goes beyond a form of altruism dictated by kin selection in that the short-term selfless behavior is extended to organisms that do not necessarily share a common ancestry. In an evolutionary sense, it seems as though a behavior that imposes a greater net cost on one individual for the sake of an unrelated person would be selected out. On the contrary, natural selection—the mechanism of evolution—will favor this kind of self-denying behavior under certain conditions. Reciprocal altruism is hardwired in our psyches and is responsible for encouraging a range of cooperative social interactions, including business exchanges.

In an economic sense, the evolution of the willingness to cooperate with others was critical to the formation of market transactions in modern society. Thus, the fact that reciprocally altruistic behavior has evolved to include members outside one's own clan has enabled social contracts to form among strangers in business contexts. Humans have developed the ability to share tasks with members of other groups in response to adaptive challenges to perform tasks that could be accomplished neither alone nor by members of a single familial group. The concept of reciprocal altruism is important for business because it is a necessary antecedent to our social institutions and division of labor within organizations. Economic relationships in our global marketplace today are facilitated by the biological and psychological propensity to engage in mutually trusting relationships with unfamiliar others.

These intergroup relationships are highly dependent on the existence of trust. Without trust as a bond for exchanges between strangers, a market system could never develop. While trust between partners can be cultivated over repeated just and fair transactions, various social institutions serve to solidify this bond. For groups to form spontaneously, a degree of reciprocal moral obligation must be present. In some cultures, this impulse still occurs primarily among kin. But in other cultures, this sense of moral duty to reciprocate does spread to nonkin. High-trust societies, such as the United States and Japan, are characteristically open to mutually beneficial relationships among strangers. There is a general moral obligation in Japan for workers employed by a particular firm not to seek higher wages and better employment elsewhere. In return, the employer provides lifetime job security.

Reciprocal altruism assumes that humans are social beings, not governed entirely by rational selfinterest. For kin, one-time altruistic behaviors that jeopardize the survival of the provider without the hope of reciprocity make sense because the genes are passed down the lineage. For nonkin, these isolated acts of altruism make little sense in the short term. For reciprocal altruism to evolve as a trait in humans, certain conditions must be present. Only if there is a probability of repeated encounters between the altruist and the beneficiary, resulting in a chance that the altruistic behavior will be reciprocated in some way, would natural selection favor the trait. Social beings establish cooperative relationships with other nonkin individuals out of expectation of future gain.

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