meilin wrote:
Reciprocity and Altruism
As you have now seen, many seemingly complex choice behaviors can be explained in terms of operant conditioning, involving an S ➔ R ➔ O association. You have learned that people and other animals will choose among possible behaviors in a way that maximizes expected subjective value and that they can show self-control, or the willingness to work now for anticipated future rewards. These behaviors all seem generally consistent with Thorndike’s law of effect (described earlier), which states that actions resulting in desirable outcomes (reinforcers) should increase in frequency and that actions resulting in undesirable outcomes (punishers) typically decrease in frequency.
But there are other behaviors that seem to violate the law of effect. An important example is altruism, which occurs when organisms act in ways that benefit another—at the expense of some cost to themselves. Examples of altruism in human behavior would be an individual donating food or money to help victims of a natural disaster and someone waiting in line allowing another to go first.
Other animals appear to show altruistic behavior as well. Among social insects such as some bees and wasps, individuals may sacrifice their own lives to care for and defend the queen and her offspring in the hive (Gadagkar, 2016; Nouvian, Reinhard, & Giurfa, 2016). Among meerkats, a male will “volunteer” to babysit for the day, sacrificing his own opportunity to eat, while others in the group forage for food (Carlson et al., 2006). And dolphins have been observed swimming for hours underneath an injured female dolphin, helping to support her body near the surface so she can continue breathing (Park et al., 2013). These seemingly altruistic actions benefit the recipients—but carry high costs to the actors. Yet the principles of operant conditioning predict that if an action results in punishment, such as loss of time and resources,
then the frequency of that action should decrease, and altruistic behaviors should extinguish. Why, then, do these altruistic behaviors persist?
Many apparently altruistic acts occur in the context of kin relationships, as when parents sacrifice time and energy to feed and care for their young, sometimes risking death or injury to protect the young from predators. Among many social animals, such as meerkats and social insects, most of the individuals in a colony are closely related—an extended “family.” In these cases, animals performing altruistic acts sacrifice their own well-being to promote the welfare of their kin. This has been explained in terms of natural selection: an individual’s kin (children, siblings, nieces, and nephews) share many of the same genes, so that acting to help those kin survive into the next generation is actually a way to promote the survival of one’s own genes (Hamilton, 1963). Thus, genes that predispose animals to behave in seemingly altruistic ways toward their kin are genes that are likely to be passed down to future generations, which will in turn also tend to behave in altruistic ways. Much seemingly altruistic behavior among kinship groups may be interpreted this way (Griffin & West, 2003).
However, not all altruistic behavior is easily explained in terms of promoting kin survival. Altruistic acts sometimes occur between “friends” who are not genetically related. For example, genetically unrelated macaque monkeys will sit and groom one another, combing through each other’s fur to find and remove small parasites (Adiseshan, Adiseshan, & Isbell, 2011); unrelated male dolphins may form “alliances” to help guard each other’s female consorts (Connor, 2010); and red-winged blackbird males will help to defend unrelated neighbors’ nests (Olendorf, Getty, & Scribner, 2004). Why would animals behave this way? One possible explanation for these actions is the principle of reciprocal altruism, which states that an organism may donate time or resources to help another in the expectation that the individual will return the favor later on (Trivers, 1971). This is similar to the concept of “tit-for-tat” behavior, which can be roughly restated as “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” (Axelrod & Hamilton, 1981). For example, monkey A grooms monkey B now, in expectation that B will reciprocate later on. If that expectation pays off, it provides delayed reinforcement for monkey A’s original act, which in turn increases the likelihood that A will groom B again in the future. Similarly, humans who lend money or emotional support to a friend may do so in the expectation that someday they themselves might need help, and the friend will return the favor.
In this way, many acts of friendship and cooperation among humans and other animals can be interpreted in the context of operant conditioning:
SD (friend needs favor) âž” R (perform favor now) âž” O (receive future benefits)
Consistent with this interpretation, male red-winged blackbirds will stop defending their neighbors’ nests if those neighbors do not reciprocate (Olendorf et al., 2004), and humans will typically stop behaving generously to friends who fail to reciprocate in some fashion to sustain the friendship. Across a range of species, animals seem to be able to keep track of services given and received over considerable periods of time, and animals that have recently received small acts of “friendship,” such as co-grooming, may be more likely to offer more valuable services, such as defense, in the future (Seyfarth & Cheney, 2012).
But there are other examples of altruism that do not obviously involve expectations of reciprocity, as when a donor gives money to a charity that will redistribute the money to needy individuals who will never know the identity of the donor—and who are thus unable ever to reciprocate directly. Some humans even donate organs to strangers they will never meet, at potential cost to their own health and fitness. Even in the laboratory, when participants are asked to allocate resources between themselves and an anonymous partner, some participants (but not all!) choose to behave altruistically even though they will never meet the partner again (Seymour, Yoshida, & Dolan, 2009).
These selfless acts, undertaken without expectation of direct repayment, are harder to explain in the context of the law of effect. Possibly, the actor receives reinforcement in the form of societal approval of the good deeds, or even an internal feeling of “doing good” that reinforces the altruistic behavior. More recently, researchers have proposed that, at least for animals in social groups, the simple rule of “tit-for-tat” can be expanded to a more general rule of “help anyone if helped by someone” (Taborsky, Frommen, & Riehl, 2016). For instance, a male meerkat may volunteer to babysit today, protecting his own offspring along with the rest of the infants, in the general expectation that other males in the group will take their turns on subsequent days. Similarly, a person may help a stranger today in expectation that, in the future, someone else (or society at large) will come to his aid in return.
Of course, operant conditioning cannot easily explain all instances of altruism; in humans, cultural, philosophical, and religious factors also play a role. Nevertheless, altruism is an example of a very complex behavioral phenomenon that can at least partially be interpreted via the principles of operant conditioning and delayed reinforcement.
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20
 she said and laughed of happiness
  Everything in life is about giving and receiving. You wont do nothing if it doesnt give you some sort of benefit may it be as simple as your own little happiness. This isnt necessarily a bad thing its just how we and the world works. Plants, humans and animals all follow the same principle
