SAD LOVE QUOTES: Kindness is in our genes: How desire to do good is hard-wired into us by evolution

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Kindness is in our genes: How desire to do good is hard-wired into us by evolution

Last updated at 8:56 AM on 27th July 2011

Hard-wired: Gestures such as tipping evolve from cooperation

Tipping waiters is hard-wired into our brains, according to scientists.

Theories of evolution suggest we should incur a cost only if there's a prospect of receiving something in return, but researchers say generosity evolved from simple co-operation.

They believe humans have evolved to think it's better to take the risk of being generous and getting nothing in return than destroying a potentially beneficial future relationship by being stingy.

Study co-author Professor Leda Cosmides, of the University of California Santa Barbara, said: 'There are two errors a co-operating animal can make, and one is more costly than the other.

'Believing that you will never meet this individual again, you might choose to benefit yourself at his expense, only to find out later that the relationship could have been open-ended.

'If you make this error, you lose out on all the benefits you might have had from a long-term. This is an extraordinarily costly error.

'The other error is to mistakenly assume that you will have additional interactions, only to find out that it wasn't necessary. Although you were "unnecessarily" nice in that interaction, the cost of this error is relatively small.

'The mind is skewed to be generous to make sure we find and cement all those valuable, long-term relationships.'

Psychologist Dr Max Krasnow, from University of California Santa Barbara, said: 'When past researchers carefully measured people's choices, they found that people all over the world were more generous than the reigning theories of economics and biology predicted they should be.

In our genes: Good deeds - such as helping an old lady across the road - makes evolutionary sense

'Even when people believe the interaction to be one-time only, they are often generous to the person they are interacting with.'

Dr Krasnow carried out a series of computer simulations to see whether being generous to strangers make evolutionary sense – or whether the trait would be weeded out by natural selection.

They discovered that generosity makes evolutionary sense and that it could be an innate character trait in most human beings.

The finding explains why people tip waiters in restaurants in strange cities – even when they are unlikely to make a return visit.

Their findings appear in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr Andrew Delton, a co-author of the paper, said the reason why people were generous was due to the 'inherent uncertainty' of life.

He said: 'You can never know for certain whether an interaction you are having right now will be one-time only — like interacting with a server in a distant city — or continue on indefinitely — like interacting with a server at your favourite hometown diner.'

Previously, evolutionary psychologists have argued that people behave in a kind way to impress other people, and improve their chances of finding a mate and friends who can help them survive.

Other researchers have claimed that generosity is the result of social and peer pressure.