[1] Human reciprocal altruism would include the following behaviors (but is not limited to): helping patients, the wounded, and the others when they are in crisis; sharing food, implement, knowledge.
[1] Charles Darwin suggested that animals behave in the ways that can increase their survival and reproductive chances while competing with others.
However, altruistic behavior – the act of helping others even if it accompanies with a personal cost – is common in the animal kingdom, like the vampire bat[7] and various primates.
[8] Therefore, Charles Darwin regarded ″the Problem of Altruism″ as a potential fatal challenge to his concept of natural selection.
[2] The idea of reciprocal altruism is straightforward: an altruistic behavior is probably selected only if a return would be obtained in the future.
As a result, the subjective guess and emotion of human cooperation can be refined to a theory, and is gradually become one of the most popular explanations to a variety of social behaviors.
Therefore, the proposition of reciprocal altruism is undoubtedly a great theoretical advance in human cognition history.
Human reciprocal altruism seems to be a huge magnetic field to interweave different disciplines closely.
Generally, the core of Human reciprocal altruism is located in the puzzle: How to overcome short-term self-interest and achieve cooperation.
In 1902, Peter Kropotkin published his monograph – Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, and demonstrates the survival mechanisms of cooperation, based on various examples of animal and human societies.
The reciprocation can be delayed as long as the individuals stay in the trade, and, so to speak, have sufficient long-term memory.
In this paper, Axelrod and Hamilton [11] revealed that reciprocating the assistance from another individual is stable in evolution as long as there are enough altruists in the population.
[14] Some evolutionary biologists, like Richard Dawkins, wholly endorse Axelrod and Hamilton's work in individual selection.
In describing genes as being selfish, Dawkins[15] states that the organisms act altruistically against their individual interests in order to help copies of themselves in other bodies to replicate.
He points out that many bird species with small clutches have prolonged periods before reaching reproductive maturity, and have long breeding seasons sometimes in excess of one year.
All of these characteristics run contrary to the idea that fitness is defined by individual organisms attempting to selfishly reproduce.
In 1966, George Williams[17] published the influential Adaptation and Natural Selection: a critique of some current evolutionary thought.
By the end of the 1960s, a Neo-Darwinian interpretation of the modern synthesis had taken hold and it has become almost a gold standard that the unit of evolutionary analysis is at the individual's and the gene's level.
[18] On a personal scale, some scholars believe that reciprocal altruism derives from the subjective feeling of individuals and compliance with social rules.
The Prisoner's Dilemma requires that:[1] and that: There is immediate and obvious benefit from direct reciprocity and relatively little need for trust into the future.
Utility function[23] is an important concept in economy that measures preferences over a set of goods and services using mathematics.
Game theory, especially the prisoner's dilemma, is originally introduced by Trivers[2] to explain the mechanism of reciprocal altruism.
R. Price explained how selfish individuals can achieve cooperation and develop the basic equilibrium concept in evolutionary - Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS).
Simultaneously, the collaboration between Axelrod and Hamilton is also significant for applying game theory to evolutionary issues.
The strategy of game theory discussed in Axelrod and Hamilton's paper[11] is called Tit for Tat.
As a game theoretical strategy, Tit for Tat essentially entails the same concept as Trivers' reciprocal altruism.
These behaviors and emotions that have clearly been selected for are consistent with the Tit for Tat game theoretical strategy and reciprocal altruism.