STRATEGIC RESEARCH ON THE ACHÉ
Selection-by-reputation theory was developed by Alexander with people like the Bushmen in mind, but even for the well-studied Bushmen, there’s no research that focuses directly on sympathetic generosity and its social effects. Fortunately, there’s one fascinating systematic investigation that does touch directly upon such outcomes, conducted among the still-egalitarian Aché foragers in South America. Their recent adaptation includes being attached to a mission and practicing some horticulture, but the Aché do continue to engage in a substantial amount of foraging. The collaborative study in question focuses on the effects of having generous reputations, which fits perfectly with both Alexander’s indirect reciprocity hypothesis and with our interest here in empathetic giving. Actually, Alexander’s theory isn’t mentioned—possibly because the Aché anthropologists preferred to work with simpler models like kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and costly signaling. But the data presented do provide a nice test of selection-by-reputation theory, and the findings are positive.
This sophisticated study begins by focusing on two variables. One is how productive people are at subsistence, and the other is how freely they normally share their food. The object is to study how extensively others in their band will support them with food when certain hazards that are typical of a tropical forager lifestyle afflict them temporarily. These include short illnesses, bites from insects or snakes, personal injuries, and accidents, any of which can seriously affect an individual’s subsistence efficiency. The odds of experiencing such afflictions are high enough that problems like these are a predictable part of Aché life.
Here’s the scientific hypothesis, which I quote in full because it’s so important to the theory being advanced in this book: “We propose that when temporary disability strikes individuals under conditions of no food storage, able-bodied individuals are more likely to provide food and support to those who have strong reputations for being generous and to high producers.”2
This thoughtful investigation was based on four formalized “types”:
1.Philanthropists, who not only are unusually generous, but are unusually productive so that overall their beneficence is extensive.
2.Well-Meaners, who are exceptionally generous but also are unusually unproductive, so that what they can give away is very limited in spite of their obviously prosocial intentions.
3.Greedy Individuals, who produce a lot but give away relatively little because they are stingy.
4.Ne’er-Do-Wells, who produce little and also are stingy.3
A sample of Aché were carefully interviewed about episodes when they were incapacitated, while their everyday sharing behavior was assessed by direct observation. As a result, it was possible to quantify how productive they were, how much food they normally gave away, and how much help they had received while unable to feed themselves adequately.
The findings show that a generous reputation definitely pays off. Unsurprisingly, the bountifully generous Philanthropists were helped the most in times of need, but interestingly the attitudinally very generous Well-Meaners came in second, even though they had so little to give away. Next came the stingy Ne’er-Do-Wells, who at least had a reason for being stingy, and last were the Greedy Individuals, who were both very stingy and also very well-off. These facts fit well with Alexander’s hypothesis that people prefer to interact cooperatively with individuals with generous reputations and not with those who are known to be stingy. The findings also suggest that being sympathetically appreciative of the needs of others counts socially.
The periods of disability under study were short term. However, because food is not stored, the immediacy of Aché food procurement is such that donations by others can be important to the reproductive success of those who are disabled for even a few days.4 Thus, all four categories of people were in need of help soon after they were incapacitated. In this context, the fitness advantages of the two empathetic types—the highly productive Philanthropists and the much less productive Well-Meaners—significantly surpassed the two selfish types in the number of sympathetic helpers who came to their aid and the amount of help given.
This interesting study shows that both the resources and the motivations involved in being generous or selfish are taken into account indigenously when contingent, “safety net” assistance is needed—and that this important temporary type of help can be given amply or in far less abundance, depending on the reputation of the person who needs assistance. Consider the fact that, even though Greedy Individuals actually give away more food to others than the much less efficient but sympathetic Well-Meaners do on an everyday basis, the latter receive more help when incapacitated. This “generosity is rewarded for its own sake” hypothesis contrasts with costly signaling or “showoff” hypotheses,5 which basically predict that the best hunters will gain the best mating opportunities, but do not include generosity, per se, as a variable relevant to reproductive success.
The Aché pattern is instructive, for it shows that being generous can pay off in times of distress in part because of what is given to others, in terms of quantity,6 but also in part because the emergency help is enhanced if people recognize that previous everyday assistance given to others involved giving when it hurt. This suggests that significant generosity resulting from an ability to appreciate and respond to the needs of others could have been at work in human evolution, in the context of reputational selection.
PLEISTOCENE-STYLE EVIDENCE
Ethnographic common sense tells us that LPA peoples’ choices of spouses, work partners, trading partners, and band members worthy of being given extra help will be guided by the society’s general values—which pointedly uphold generosity and strongly condemn stinginess. Unfortunately, to test this working hypothesis, there’s no other formal study comparable to this well-focused investigation with the Aché, who do not fully qualify for the “LPA” category.
Earlier, in exploring this problem, my first move was to go to Robert Kelly’s The Foraging Spectrum, the most comprehensive compendium on hunter-gatherer socioecological behavior put together so far. Kelly acknowledges the hazards of being a forager, but there’s no specific and quantitative analysis of safety net benefits to parallel what we just reviewed with the Aché. What he does say is that “the failure to share among many hunter-gatherers in fact, results in ill feeling partly because one party fails to obtain food or gifts, but also because the failure to share sends a strong symbolic message to those left out of the division.”7
The Aché study bears this out, for the people receiving the least help in their hour of need were the Greedy Individuals, who normally had plenty but chose to share very moderately. The Aché study’s findings can also be phrased positively and with a psychological nuance. Sympathetic generosity, especially sympathetic generosity that is more costly, brings the best benefits from prosocially oriented peers. But even though Kelly acknowledges that feelings of generosity are recognized and important, basically he sees sharing patterns as ensuing from a web of obligations that leads to both requests and demands for food. This certainly is true. But what the Aché study tells us in addition is that there is a sliding scale involved and that psychologically apparent displays of generosity or stinginess are taken into account in a substantial way that can involve both positive and negative selection by reputation.
I believe this finding should hold for any LPA forager group, for the Aché continue to share basic traditional values, which favor both sharing in general and sharing with those in special need. The same golden rule thinking that inspires some individuals to be far more generous than others also influences how band members perceive these individuals, and this is part of how reputations are built.
MARRIAGE CHOICES AMONG THE HADZA OF TANZANIA
Alexander emphasizes that selection by reputation could work in supporting altruism through partnering in marriage, the assumption being that generous individuals would be given preference. Anthropologist Frank Marlowe queried
eighty-five Hadza, who do qualify as LPA foragers, as to the features they wanted in a spouse, and he used an open-ended approach that allowed the Hadza to answer in their own terms.8 As someone who had been working with the Hadza for decades, he then grouped the responses into categories that made ethnographic sense to him.
TABLE VI THE TRAITS MENTIONED BY HADZA
AS IMPORTANT IN A POTENTIAL SPOUSE†
†This table was adapted from Marlowe 2004.
Hadza marriages are not formally arranged by parents, though their blessing is sought, so the principals have substantial leeway in making their choices. Table VI shows the responses as Marlowe “clustered” them, and I have asterisked responses that are likely to imply generosity as a general personal quality that the Hadza value.9
Here I reproduce Marlowe’s findings, in which he has organized all the valid responses for choosing a mate into eight categories. The greatest number of informants referred to the Character (sixteen mentions) of a desired spouse; Looks (eleven), Foraging skills (nine), and Fidelity (six) were also salient. Under Character, nepotistic generosity was obvious in the response “Cares for kids,” whereas by implication altruistic generosity seems possible in “Good character, Nice, Compatible, Good heart, Understanding, Good person, and Good soul.” Under Foraging, generosity is strongly implied in all of the starred categories, which have to do with the subsistence contributions of a marital partner. Furthermore, under Fidelity generosity might have been figuring in the “Good reputation” category even though sexual reputations appear to be the focus.
The virtue of using open-ended responses is that the ethnographer doesn’t impose alien categories that distort the data; the liability is that things that are very obvious to natives may go unstated. I suspect that had Marlowe given his informants a range of choices that included being generous, this would have been a frequent preference because in every hunter-gatherer ethos this is such a major virtue.10 As it is, however, this piece of research goes far beyond most ethnographies in at least providing some major hints as to how a reputation for generosity could figure strongly in one important type of social choice.
Another African example comes from Marjorie Shostak, in a passage that characterizes how the !Kung evaluate prospective marriage partners for their daughters: “In choosing a son-in-law, parents consider age (the man should not be too much older than their daughter), marital status (an unmarried man is preferable to one already married and seeking a second wife), hunting ability, and a willingness to accept the responsibilities of family life. A cooperative, generous, and unaggressive nature is looked for, as well.”11
Here, the ethnographic mentioning of generosity is direct, while the criteria subscribed to by the !Kung parents who are looking out for the welfare of their daughters (and themselves) correspond rather well with criteria subscribed to by Hadza of both sexes in seeking partners individually. Although my coded data for LPA foragers do not specify preferences that are salient in choosing whom to associate with in marital or other partnerships, I believe that the preferences shown in these two unrelated African groups are widespread even though many ethnographers have failed to touch upon this subject.
LESS DIRECT EVIDENCE
Making a really definitive case for selection by reputation as a major support for our human capacity for empathetic altruism will require substantial further research effort, and I would place replication of the Aché study high on any list of priorities. Unfortunately, in 2012 there are very few LPA hunter-gatherers left like the Hadza, many of whom are still actually in business as economically independent foragers.
What this preliminary analysis suggests is that ultimately there is far more to explaining hunter-gatherer sharing than a combination of selfishly tit-for-tat reciprocal altruism, resented-but-tolerated theft of meat, costly signaling by the very best hunters, or group selection effects. These models obviously are useful, but some of them seem to reduce sharing and helping behavior to pure economic self-interest, which is ethnographically counterintuitive. To fully understand human sharing and its evolution, the roles that culturally defined generosity and social reputations based on sympathetic generosity play must be brought more directly into the equation.
Meanwhile, we may start with what we know about ourselves as culturally modern humans, who, to reiterate an important and revealing pattern, often respond to televised pleas for help for needy children on the other side of the world and do this anonymously so that the motives can only be ones of generosity. We may also think about both Thomas the Cree hunter and the small Hadza party, none of whom could conceive of not sharing with a person in serious need—even when the generosity was extremely unlikely to be repaid even on a contingent basis, because the recipient was a member of a different group. These examples may be “anecdotal,” but in the absence of systematic information, anecdotes can provide useful leads.
In an important sense, with the Aché it seems to be the thought, or more properly, the feeling, that counts. This is not to say that among hunter-gatherers sharing isn’t guided strongly by a sense of past obligations and past material benefits, or that selfish personal interests are not important in motivating people to engage with a system of indirect reciprocity for the “insurance benefits.” My argument is that generosity based on feelings of sympathy also contributes significantly to the overall process, and that such responses are highly consistent with the deliberately, well-internalized, prosocial values that help such systems to operate as well as they do.
In this light, the Golden Rule is not just about transferring commodities from one person to another so that reciprocation will take place; it’s also about fostering a spirit of generosity that can engender more generosity. And the universality of such preaching can be explained in two ways. One is that people believe in its effects as an agency that can make social relations more positive in an immediate sense. The other is that it more generally functions to oil the machinery of a system of indirect reciprocity so that the system operates more smoothly for everyone and provokes less serious conflict over the long term, which helps groups to flourish. I am not so certain that this second effect is consciously obvious to the actors involved, but hunter-gatherers do actively appreciate social harmony for its own sake.12
What I’m suggesting is that, even though giving to those in need on the basis of a combination of empathy and reciprocity may be difficult to measure scientifically, this is a cornerstone of human cooperation, and it’s definitely not based on precise, tit-for-tat exchange. The unique Netsilik system for seal-sharing may have come rather close in combining an indirect-reciprocity-based system with a very exact structure for contingent reciprocation. But the remarkable network-based system created by the Netsilik appears to be the product of special social and ecological circumstances; their next-door cultural neighbors, the Utku, have no such arrangements.
It’s worth emphasizing here that when the Netsilik cluster for months in aggregations of sixty or more, they do not try to share every seal among the entire population. Rather, they create mininetworks that link about half a dozen hunters in a variance-reduction system on the same scale as in a band of thirty, which also has about the same number of hunters. LPA sharing systems for initial meat distributions can be far less formalized; they depend on everyone’s understanding and accepting the heavily contingent nature of the band-wide system in terms of who produces what—and who gets what. Giving special help to those in temporary need works similarly, but it appears to be influenced quite significantly by generous versus stingy reputations, whereas basically any group member in good standing may receive a fair share of the meat when large game is taken.
The safety-net type of sharing the Aché study investigated definitely was reputation based, and in such cases band life becomes a social stage on which good and bad reputations have been built with respect to being generous—or stingy. The game theory experiments in evolutionary economics that I have alluded to so frequently bear this out quite nicely. Once a
prospective partner realizes someone is prone to be generous, a reciprocating, cooperative partnership can develop.
REPUTATIONAL SELECTION SUPPORTS ALTRUISM
If we take a close look at several dozen geographically distributed foraging societies, as has been done recently in the journal Science,13 and if we focus just on the third of them that fit with our LPA category of hunter-gatherers, there’s a range of band sizes and compositions that varies around some strong central tendencies that are of interest for the theories being developed in this book.
One is a tendency for just a few close kin to be coresident in the same band, which means these bands are far from being kin units. That’s why I’ve said that kin selection models have limited applicability in explaining the band-wide cooperative systems that humans had evolved by the Late Pleistocene, unless the piggybacking “slippage” factor we talked about in Chapter 3 has been very substantial. It also is characteristic of these mobile bands for people to be moving from one band to another, and while this degree of porosity reduces the force of genetic group selection’s operating with much mechanical force,14 nonetheless I think its contributions are likely to be significant.
A further consideration is that as today some form of mostly monogamous marriage would have been universal among earlier LPA foragers. As a two-way process, selection by reputation should have tended to pair off the more generous cooperators for breeding and child-nurturance purposes, as well as for purposes of subsistence. This is strongly implicit in the findings from the Hadza study we considered a few pages back, while with the !Kung it is more explicit. Thus, all of these mechanisms—selection by reputation, reciprocal altruism, kin selection, and genetic group selection—need to be modeled simultaneously. Chapter 3 was devoted largely to studying their workings, and for the most part any of these models can operate quite independently of the others.15
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