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Science 26 October 2007:
Vol. 318. no. 5850, pp. 636 - 640
DOI: 10.1126/science.1144237
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Reports

The Coevolution of Parochial Altruism and War

Jung-Kyoo Choi1 and Samuel Bowles2*

Altruism—benefiting fellow group members at a cost to oneself—and parochialism—hostility toward individuals not of one's own ethnic, racial, or other group—are common human behaviors. The intersection of the two—which we term "parochial altruism"—is puzzling from an evolutionary perspective because altruistic or parochial behavior reduces one's payoffs by comparison to what one would gain by eschewing these behaviors. But parochial altruism could have evolved if parochialism promoted intergroup hostilities and the combination of altruism and parochialism contributed to success in these conflicts. Our game-theoretic analysis and agent-based simulations show that under conditions likely to have been experienced by late Pleistocene and early Holocene humans, neither parochialism nor altruism would have been viable singly, but by promoting group conflict, they could have evolved jointly.

1 School of Economics and Trade, Kyungpook National University, 1370 Sankyuk-dong, Buk-gu, Daegu 702-701, Korea.
2 Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM 08571, USA; and Dipartimento di Economica Politica, University of Siena, Piazza San Francesco, 7, 53100 Siena, Italia.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: bowles{at}santafe.edu

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