Abstract
The emergence of altruistic behavior constitutes one of the most widely studied problems in evolutionary biology and behavioral science. Multiple explanations have been proposed, most importantly including kin selection, reciprocity, and costly signaling in sexual selection. In order to test the latter, this study investigated whether people behave more altruistically when primed by photographs of attractive faces and whether more or less altruistic people differ in the number of sexual and romantic partners. Participants in the general population (N = 158, 84 F, 74 M) first rated the attractiveness of photographs of 20 faces of the opposite (sexually preferred) sex and then played the Dictator and Ultimatum Games (DG and UG). The photograph rating acted as priming; half the participants received photographs of people rated as more attractive than average in an earlier study, and the other half received photographs previously rated as less attractive. The attractiveness-primed participants, especially men, were expected to behave more altruistically—signaling that they are desirable, resource-possessing partners. We also expected altruists to self-report more sexual and romantic partners. The observed difference between altruistic behaviors in the attractiveness- and unattractiveness-primed groups occurred in UG offers, however, in the opposite than expected direction in women. The number of sexual partners was positively correlated to minimum acceptable offers (MAOs) in the UG, in line with expectations based on the theory of costly signaling.
Highlights
“To ignore the questions of survival value and evolution. . . makes it impossible to arrive at an understanding of behavioral problem.”
In the presence of observers, people are more inclined toward generosity (Haley and Fessler, 2005; Bateson et al, 2006; Burnham and Hare, 2007; Bourrat et al, 2011; Ernest-Jones et al, 2011; Nettle et al, 2013; the effect may be limited to short cue exposure: Sparks and Barclay, 2013), and they donate more under nonanonymous settings (Burnham, 2003)
We aimed to investigate the effect of attractiveness in both ways, i.e., expecting subjects to behave more altruistically in the Dictator Game (DG)/Ultimatum Game (UG) after viewing photographs of attractive people of the opposite sex and expecting altruists to have more self-reported sexual and romantic partners
Summary
“To ignore the questions of survival value and evolution. . . makes it impossible to arrive at an understanding of behavioral problem.”. Altruism as a costly signal (driven by sexual selection; e.g., Zahavi, 1995) represents one of the major evolutionary theories of altruism and has received a lot of attention among evolutionary biologists, psychologists, and behavioral scientists studying humans. These findings may be attributed to general social selection and reputation seeking (which includes sexual selection as the reputation of an altruist would be advantageous in mate choice)
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