Michael Tomasello is Co-Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, and author of "The Cultural Origins of Human Cooperation" and "Why We Cooperate."
# Why We Cooperate (Boston Review Book/MIT Press, 2009) Tomasello has studied altruism and collaboration in children as a way to gain insights into "natural" propensities of human beings to cooperate. Altruism: "one individual sacrificing in some way for anothers. Collaboration: "Multiple individuals working together for mutual benefit." Tomasello: "[F]rom around their first birthdays -- when they first begin to walk and talk and become truly cultural beings - huma children are already cooperative and helpful in many, though obviously not all, situations. And they do not learn this from adults; it comes naturally. But later in ontogeny, children's relatively indiscriminate cooperativeness becomes mediated by such influences as their judgments of likely reciprocity and their concern for how others in the group judge them....and they begin to internalize many culturally specific social norms for how we do things, how one ought to do things if one is to be a member of this group." p. 4
Tomasello and his team devised a variety of experiments to try to isolate acts of altruism and cooperation in infants and young children, and compare their behaviors to those of apes and chimpanzees. Among their findings:
Helping: Infants of fourteen to eight months of age help adults fetch out-of-reach objects, remove obstacles, correct an adult's mistake and choose the correct behavioral means for a task. All of the scenarios were very likely novel, at least in their particulars, for the infants. Infants needed to "be able to perceive others' goals in a variety of situations, and second, to have the altruistic motive to help them." p. 7
Informing: Human infants inform others of needed information as early as twelve months of age, pre-linguistically, by pointing. p. 14. They exhibit "philosopher Paul Grice's principle of cooperation: others are trying to be helpful by informing me of things relevant not to themselves but to their interlocutors." p. 18
Sharing: In the case of sharing resources such as food, human children seem to be more generous than chimpanzees." But this is only a matter of degree. p. 28
Reciprocity and Norms: Tomasello states: "There is very little evidence in any of these three cases -- helping, informing, and sharing -- that the altruism children display is a result of acculturation, parental intervention, or any other form of socialization." p. 28. Children, do, however, absorb cultural values and norms through "modeling, communication and instruction." p. 30. Children at some point become aware that they are the targets of the judgments of others who are using social norms as standards. So children attempt to influence these judgments -- what the sociologist Erving Goffman called 'impression management.'" Through this kind of vigilance is born the public self, whose reputation we all spend so much time and energy cultivating and defending." p. 30-31
"In the contemporary study of human behavioral evolution, the central problem is altruism, specifically, how it came to be. There is no widely accepted solution to that question...." Punishment of non-cooperators...helps to stabilize cooperation -- but punishment is a public good for which the punished pays the cost and everyone benefits. But Tomasello believes altruism is "only a bit player. The star is mutualism, in which we all benefit from our cooperation but only if we work together, what we may call collaboration." p. 52
The problem is not the prisoner's dilemma (as Brian Skyrms shows), but rather "our scenario is a stag hunt in which everyone prefers to collaborate because of the rewqards doing so brings each of us and our compatriots. The problem is how we can get ourselves to join forces. This is not a trivial task since what I do in such situations depends on what I think you will do and vice versa, recursively, which means that we must be able to communicate and trust one another sufficiently." p. 54
Needed: 1) skills and motivations for shared intentionality; 2) more tolerant and trusting of one another than modern apes; and 3) group-level, institutional practices involving public social norms and the assignment of deontic status to institutional roles. p. 55
Shared intentionality: "This sense that we are doing something together -- which creates mutual expectations, and even rights and obligations -- is, one could argue, uniquely human....Searle, among others, has shown how the sense of acting together can scale up to the kinds of collective intentionality involved in doing something as institutionally complex as shopping at a supermarket, which exists on the basis of rights, obligations, money, and governments, which in turn exist because 'we' all believe and act as if they do." p. 58 (J.R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (1995).
Three factors that influence shared intentionality: 1) coordination and communication; 2) tolerance and trust; 3) norms and institutions. p. 59. Establishing joint goals constitutes a kind of coordination problem that requires some specific forms of communication. Also, some division of labor and mutual understanding of different roles. A dual-level intentional structure: "shared focus of attention at a higher level, differentiated into individual perspectives at a lower level. p. 70
The sclera of humans -- the visible white part of eyes -- is about three times larger than that of nonhuman primates, which makes the direction of human gaze much more easily detectable by others. Tomasello: "advertising my eye direction for all to see could only have evolved in a cooperative social environment in which others were not likely to exploit it to my detriment." p. 76. "monitoring one another's attentional focus was to everyone's benefit in completing joint tasks."
Norms of cooperation (including moral norms) and norms of conformity (including constitutive rules).
UCLA anthropologist Robert Boyd has argued with great insight that punishment and norms turn problems of competition (as in mixed-motive games, such as the prisoner's dilemma) into problems of coordination." Would-be free riders must "in effect, coordinate with expectations and desires [of potential punishers and gossips] if they want to avoid punishment." Internalized social norms, with accompanying guilt and shame, ensure that coordination with the group's expectations need not involve any overt behavior." p. 95. "Norms provide the background of trust in which agent-neutral roles and shared cooperative activities with joint goals and joint attention enable social institutions."