Altruists Attract

Abstract

Explaining human cooperation continues to present a challenge because it goes beyond what is predicted by established theories of kinship and reciprocal altruism. Little attention has been paid to the sexual selection hypothesis that proposes that cooperation can act as a display that attracts mates. The costs of cooperating are then offset not by kinship or reciprocation but by increased mating success. Here we present results from a series of experiments which show that, as predicted by the sexual selection hypothesis, people preferentially direct cooperative behavior towards more attractive members of the opposite sex. Furthermore, cooperative behavior increases the perceived attractiveness of the cooperator. Economically costly behaviors can therefore bring benefits through mate choice and sexual selection should be regarded as an evolutionary mechanism capable of promoting cooperation.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 107 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.