Social Reward and Empathy as Proximal Contributions to Altruism: The Camaraderie Effect

Abstract

Natural selection favors individuals to act in their own interests, implying that wild animals experience a competitive psychology. Animals in the wild also express helping behaviors, presumably at their own expense and suggestive of a more compassionate psychology. This apparent paradox can be partially explained by ultimate mechanisms that include kin selection, reciprocity, and multilevel selection, yet some theorists argue such ultimate explanations may not be sufficient and that an additional "stake in others" is necessary for altruism's evolution. We suggest this stake is the "camaraderie effect," a by-product of two highly adaptive psychological experiences: social motivation and empathy. Rodents can derive pleasure from access to others and this appetite for social rewards motivates individuals to live together, a valuable psychology when group living is adaptive. Rodents can also experience empathy, the generation of an affective state more appropriate to the situation of another compared to one's own. Empathy is not a compassionate feeling but it has useful predictive value. For instance, empathy allows an individual to feel an unperceived danger from social cues. Empathy of another's stance toward one's self would predict either social acceptance or ostracism and amplify one's physiological sensitivity to social isolation, including impaired immune responses and delayed wound healing. By contrast, altruistic behaviors would promote well-being in others and feelings of camaraderie from others, thereby improving one's own physiological well-being. Together, these affective states engender a stake in others necessary for the expression of altruistic behavior.

Fig. 1

The Reciprocity Chain represents emotions felt and expressed during a dyadic social interaction between Individual A (a) and Individual B (b). In this simple model, Individual A experiences a change in emotion while interacting with Individual B. This change in affect is expressed as a behavioral cue by Individual A that is detected by Individual B and in turn provokes an emotional change in Individual B, which is again expressed, and detected by Individual A. While emotions elude direct scientific observation, their expressions can be measured

Fig. 2

The camaraderie effect may have evolved as a by-product, or a spandrel, of two adaptive psychological capacities, social reward and empathy. Social reward supports a motivation for living in groups and is responsive to aggressive and affiliative social cues. The affective states included in social motivation include isolation aversion and social reward. Social reward and isolation aversion are two of four affective states that can be inferred from social CPP testing. Other states include social aversion and isolation reward and may play a role in voluntary dispersal. The survival value of social reward is that it supports group living. Empathy is useful for predicting future events from social cues, such as the presence or absence of a threat in the environment from cues of calm or fear. In turn empathy engenders an affective state of vicarious calm or vicarious fear, so one can be alert to dangers not perceived directly or one can be calm under situations felt to be safe by others. In combination, social reward and empathy can generate the camaraderie effect, a process whereby vicarious feelings of others toward the actor can be either discomforting or can engender a sense of well-being. In turn, these psychological states may affect physiological health. These ideas are presented as text over a photograph of a spandrel in San Marco Cathedral, showing social reward and empathy as adaptive psychological states, represented by the arches holding up the dome with the camaraderie effect as a spandrel between these functional and highly adaptive arches