Washington, July 26 (ANI): A team of scientists at UC Santa Barbara has revealed that generosity-acting to help others in the absence of foreseeable gains-emerges naturally from the evolution of cooperation.
This means that human generosity is likely to rest on more than social pressure, and is instead built in to human nature.
"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," Max M. Krasnow, a postdoctoral scholar at UCSB's Center for Evolutionary Psychology, and one of the study's lead authors, said.
"Even when people believe the interaction to be one-time only, they are often generous to the person they are interacting with," he stated.
Andrew Delton, also a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Evolutionary Psycholog, added, "Our simulations explain that the reason people are more generous than economic and biological theory would predict is due to the inherent uncertainty of social life."
Their findings appeared in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (ANI)
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