“It Was Nothing”—Extending Evolutionary Models Of Altruism By Two Social Cognitive Biases In Judgments Of The Costs And Benefits Of Helping

Abstract

Evolutionary theories of helping (inclusive fitness, reciprocal altruism) require cognitive augmentation to account for the frequent helping of strangers and for the helper's willingness to incur immediate, certain costs for delayed, uncertain benefits. Both experiments reported here demonstrate two social cognitive biases in perceived cost to helper and benefit to recipient that promote helping, including helping strangers. Firstly, people show a counterintuitive self-effacing modesty bias, underestimating the value of help they provide relative to help received. This creates feelings of indebtedness that elicit and maintain helping, complementing a “cheater detection” mechanism that limits helping. A second cognitive bias is that as helper-recipient relationship becomes closer, opposing behavioral and cognitive effects appear. As closeness increases, more valuable help is exchanged; for the same behavior, judged benefit to recipient increases but, surprisingly, judged cost to helper decreases, a “labor of love” effect. These two nonobvious social cognitive biases encourage human helping behavior.