What you just described is group selection, and thus highly unlikely.
It’s to your individual benefit to be more (unconsciously) selfish and calculating in these situations, whether the other people in your group have a fairness drive or not.
It’s to your individual benefit to be more (unconsciously) selfish and calculating in these situations, whether the other people in your group have a fairness drive or not.
Not if you are punished for selfishness. I’m not sure how reasonable the following analysis it (since I didn’t study this kind of thing at all); it suggests that fairness is a stable strategy, and given some constraints a more feasible one than selfishness:
M. A. Nowak, et al. (2000). `Fairness versus reason in the ultimatum game.’. Science 289(5485):1773-1775. (PDF)
...and if your companions have circuitry for detecting and punishing selfish behaviour—what then? That’s how the “fairness drive” is implemented—get mad and punish cheaters until it hurts. That way, cheaters learn that crime doesn’t pay—and act fairly.
I agree. But you see how this individual selection pressure towards fairness is different from the group selection pressure that dclayh was actually asserting?
You’re introducing weaker and less plausible factors to rescue a mistaken assertion. It’s not worth it.
As pointed out below in this thread, the fairness drive almost certainly comes from the individual pressure of cheaters being punished, not from any group pressure as you tried to say above.
What you just described is group selection, and thus highly unlikely.
It’s to your individual benefit to be more (unconsciously) selfish and calculating in these situations, whether the other people in your group have a fairness drive or not.
Not if you are punished for selfishness. I’m not sure how reasonable the following analysis it (since I didn’t study this kind of thing at all); it suggests that fairness is a stable strategy, and given some constraints a more feasible one than selfishness:
M. A. Nowak, et al. (2000). `Fairness versus reason in the ultimatum game.’. Science 289(5485):1773-1775. (PDF)
See reply to Tim Tyler.
...and if your companions have circuitry for detecting and punishing selfish behaviour—what then? That’s how the “fairness drive” is implemented—get mad and punish cheaters until it hurts. That way, cheaters learn that crime doesn’t pay—and act fairly.
I agree. But you see how this individual selection pressure towards fairness is different from the group selection pressure that dclayh was actually asserting?
You and EY seem to be the people who are talking about group selection.
Not when the cost (including opportunity cost) of doing the calculating outweighs the benefit it would give you.
You’re introducing weaker and less plausible factors to rescue a mistaken assertion. It’s not worth it.
As pointed out below in this thread, the fairness drive almost certainly comes from the individual pressure of cheaters being punished, not from any group pressure as you tried to say above.