Thread: Altruism in Proverbs (research survey)

Done

I didn't find any of those to be altruistic, everything that even appeared altruistic was phrased to remind you that altruism is an investment, not a gift.

that's alright.

I should have said this before but it's probably better to not make comments about the survey that people might read before they take it. No big deal though.

Done.

Spoiler for Read after survey:

I will say that 7 on your scale might as well ascribe motivations to "fairy magic." Any proverb with any bearing on altruism is either going to be trying to convey to the thick-headed why altruism ultimately benefits them, or as in the case of many of your quotes advising against altruism and in favor of more obvious self-interest or group-interest.

What could a proverb advising "pure gift" say? "Give."?? "Help."?? As soon as any context or reason is introduced, self-interest and consequences come into play.

Regardless, it looks like the thrust of your research has to do with blood relations vs. friends and strangers, rather than altruism generally.

Spoiler for @Taosaur & Omnis, others please take the survey before reading ;):

Yeah, you seemed to have it figured out; it is about kin vs. non-kin. I agree that a proverb that actually scores a 7 wouldn't be likely to survive cultural selection, but that's not really the point here. It's the relative location on the continuum that matters. Thanks for your participation and comments

BTW, when I don't look closely at your avatar, I see Snoopy. It does look like a pretty great t-shirt, though.

You may want break this down into the different motivations for altruism. Is it to build a community support structure, or does it refer to a trust between two people? Is it kin (or intra-religion) altruism? Is it empathy-based? These are important questions for psychologists, and the philosophy of ethics. Don't know how evolutionary anthropologists deal with it, tho. If you're writing a big paper, these subtypes and their discussions should help you flesh it out.

Or maybe you're already thinking about these things? I dunno.

Also, it pisses me off that people dismiss altruism as, "not true altruism" for reasons x or y, as if the utility of altruism devalues its meaning to the people involved in the act(s).

The survey's finished, I can talk about this more now.

@Abra, cool, thanks. I pretty well have my approach established, but that type of thing might fit into my discussion. The main aspect of altruism that I'm concerned with in my field is how it evolved, so that builds on things like game theory and the prisoner's dilemma, Hamilton's rule and inclusive fitness (kin selection), Trivers' reciprocal altruism and multilevel/group selection. All these that I mentioned are theoretical models that try to highlight the conditions that allowed this seemingly paradoxical behavior (helping others at a cost to yourself) to evolve in the first place, and to become so especially prevalent in humans.

The twist and slightly unusual approach I'm taking is to use proverbs to test predictions from the theoretical models. These have mostly been tested in labs through stimulus manipulation and self-preference-reporting, so to look to real-world output to see if predictions hold up is a fresh approach.

My hypothesis is very simple, that proverbs will advocate more altruism towards kin than towards non-kin. This may seem obvious but it comes straight from the theoretical models, where non-kin cooperate due to benefits of reciprocal altruism, kin have the additional benefits of inclusive fitness. This hasn't been tested in this way much outside of labs, and oral literature such as folklore and proverbs is at least as good a source for data as doing field studies on real people. Either way you can expect to get more authentic results than you can on a person in a lab who knows they're being studied.

I picked out the proverbs carefully, there are 30 total, half relate to kin and half relate to non-kin. Additionally, 10 come from Finland, 10 from Japan, and 10 form the Ovambo of southern Africa. So, I can do some cross-cultural analysis as well. I got 61 survey responses, and I got significantly higher altruism ratings for kin proverbs from the Japanese and Ovambo collections, and non-significantly higher for kin in the Finnish collection. (don't ask me what constitutes a non-significant difference... it's a statistics thing.)

Now all I have to do is run all this through SPSS and write about 10000 words about it by mid September.

That sounds pretty cool, actually