This concept stands in contrast to the idea of homo economicus, which states the opposite theory that human beings are exclusively motivated by self-interest.
Russian theorist Peter Kropotkin wrote about the concept of "mutual aid" in the early part of the 20th century.
The Homo reciprocans concept states that human being players interact with a propensity to cooperate.
Empirical evidence suggests that positive and negative reciprocity are fundamentally different behavioral dispositions in the sense that the values for positive and negative reciprocity in individuals are only weakly correlated and that these values correlate differently with factors such as gender or age.
[3] This finding is echoed by Warneken and Tomasello’s study on reciprocity in children, through which they found that girls are more prosocial than boys.
[3] Cultural psychologists Joan Miller and David Bersoff, in an experimental study in 1994, found that Americans receive greater utility in providing help under a reciprocity condition than without one; on the other hand, Indians displayed virtually no difference in utility with or without a prior reciprocal occasion.