The varying relationship between helping and individual quality

Abstract

Individuals of different quality often differ in their helping behavior, but sometimes it is the high-quality individuals who help most (e.g., human meat sharing, vigilance) and other times it is the low-quality individuals (e.g., reproductive queues, primate grooming). We argue that these differences depend on individual differences in the performance costs of actually helping, the opportunity costs from forsaking alternative activities, and the fitness benefits for engaging the help. If helping is more difficult for some individuals to do (quality-dependent help), it will usually be done by high-quality individuals, whereas help that all individuals could do equally well (quality-independent help) will be done by whoever pays lower opportunity costs. Our model makes novel predictions about many kinds of helping, allows us to categorize different types of helping by their relationship with individual quality, and is general enough to apply to many situations. Furthermore, it can be generalized to any other type of (nonhelping) behavior where there are individual differences in benefits, performance costs, or opportunity costs.