Essay on Are People Selfish?
As a matter of fact, scientists wonder whether selfishness or altruism drive human evolution and give arguments in favor and against it. Evolutionary theorists concentrated mainly on competition, natural selection and selfishness, but couldn’t deny one evident fact that humans would not be able to survive in nature without social reciprocity, communication and cooperation.
Recent research proves that evolution favors cooperation, while selfishness never brings long-term success, it requires cooperation. The recent discovery conflicts with the Zero-Dominant theory that provides selfish players a guaranteed way to beat cooperative ones. Zero-Dominant theory offers advantages to the selfish when they are against the cooperative players. Otherwise, it won’t work. In Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged we read that human nature is fundamentally selfish and every one exists only for his own sake. Modern studies show, however, that humans and animals are unable to evolve in cooperative environment by being selfish, that challenges a previous theory justifying selfish behavior. It has been estimated that children have innate desire for equity and are less selfish than often considered. Experiments show that toddlers will help adults without being asked to do so. It also contradicts with Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection that presents individuals as selfish, on the one hand, and on the other hand, UK scholar considers that Darwin himself was puzzled with cooperation he observed in nature, especially by social insects. Natural disasters like earthquakes or tsunami are a vivid example of heroism, altruism and sharing of resources. Human stress systems are designed to connect to others, while even short-term isolation may be destructive. US researchers who worked out a model of the well-known prisoner’s dilemma game demonstrated the reasonability of cooperation that we observe in the animal kingdom, microbial world and in humans. That is communication is the key reason of cooperation, only doing so people will eventually be more successful. Studying social distance and other-regarding behavior scholars worked with dictator and ultimatum games and noticed that in history everything was commonly shared and distributed equally between members of a community. Thus, they claim society follows the principle of reciprocal altruism, sharing traditions in terms of private costs that reinforce reciprocal actions. They suppose that individuals bring their personal life experiences into the experiment and as the anonymity or social isolation decreases the offer distributions also diminish. Social distance importance is evident and people appear to value social interaction with others when making decisions. Thus, not all act in their self-interest. Only in complete isolation researchers trace strictly self-interest behavior. They consider that dictator an ultimatum games should be modeled in terms of implicit and explicit expectations. Other-regarding preferences are found to have a social, what-do-others-know component. So, the presence of the experimenter reduces the incidence of self-regarding behavior. Behavior is considerably determined with what others may think, thus can be called a form of social exchange.
Though, people are said to be inherently selfish since it has always been their defense mechanism, for today’s society selfishness does no good. So, people being social creatures group together in families, tribes, nations and social traits are considered to be best rational policies. Only having learned to work as a team they will be able to communicate more effectively, that will in its turn bring us long-term results and make the world a better place to live in.
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