Curb Your Altruism
On the face of it, it seems like there cannot be too much altruism in a cooperative enterprise, since altruism is generally considered to be a facilitator of cooperation. But an article I have recently stumbled upon says too much altruism can indeed handicap cooperation — with empirical data to show for it.
The article is from Akresh, Chen, and Moore (2016)[1], who studied rural households in Burkina Faso, a country located in West Africa. There are both monogamous and polygynous households in the domain they studied. Both men and women work at the fields.
The study revealed that cooperation — as measured by the efficiency of agricultural production — is higher among co-wives of polygynous households, where the wives are less altruistic toward each other (no surprises here) compared to monogamous wife-husband pairs. The game-theoretical explanation worked out in the paper is that whilst greater altruism increases non-cooperative outcome, at the same time it lowers the incentive to cooperate (other things being equal) and causes less severe threat of punishment. That is to say, in more crude terms, high levels of altruism brings about a Samaritan’s Dilemma of sorts (as remarked by the authors), in which the altruism of others encourage individuals to be less cooperative (gains to cooperation is reduced); i.e., to take advantage of other agents’ altruism while they can get away with it.
Before you ask, yes, Akresh et al. (2016) did control for the potential confounding factors that come to mind at once. Their analyses show that, the better cooperation among co-wives compared to wife-husband pairs does not result from that (i) women tend to cooperate better with other women compared to with men; (ii) women who prefer to take part in polygynous relationships share some traits that make them better cooperators compared to ones who prefer monogamy.
So it appears that in some contexts it may enhance cooperation to keep altruism of the players in check, and in some cases one can prefer the groups whose members are are not too altruistic toward each other for best collective output.
Actually, the idea that there are situations in which there is a conflict between being too concerned with the sake of other members of the group and the sake of the group, as indicated by the findings of this study, is not unfamiliar. Indeed, this study can taken to be encouraging us to recall and appreciate the old Turkish adage “Eat and drink with friends, but don’t do business with them.”
[1] Akresh, R., Chen, J. J., & Moore, C. T. (2016). Altruism, cooperation, and efficiency: Agricultural production in polygynous households. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 64(4), 661–696.
