Altruism within the family reconsidered: do nice guys finish last?

Abstract

This paper criticizes the view that altruism either increases the benefits of group interactions or improves the allocation of resources within families. The authors identify a variety of circumstances in which members of a group would prefer to interact with less altruistic individuals and in which the efficiency of resource allocation is inversely related to the prevailing degree of altruism. Reasons that altruism might be a counter-productive social force include 1) it can alter the social utility possibility frontier in surprising and sometimes unfortunate ways; 2) it can entail exploitability causing family members to behave in ways that leave all parties worse off; 3) altruists may take inefficient actions to preempt exploitation; and 4) family members may establish efficient resource allocation by punishing selfish behavior. A rise in the level of altruism may lead to the exclusion of certain punishment strategies on the grounds of credibility. 1 general positive result is that sufficiently high levels of altruism almost always lead to efficient resource allocation. One should not necessarily expect to find strong altruistic linkages between spouses nor should altruism necessarily contributed to marital stability. In addition to the connections between this work and the literature on family behavior this analysis has broader implications concerning the role of altruism in society and the evolution of social conscience.

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