I recently read Parent-Offspring Conflict by Trivers for my evolutionary psychology class. I strongly recommend it as it is one of the best readings from an already interesting class. Notably, it (partially) solves a problem I remember being addressed on Overcoming Bias in a way that I felt was unsatisfactory. Specifically, why parents encourage altruism and other pro-social values in their children. To summarize Trivers’ position on the subject, reciprocal altruism, retribution, and reputation are often extended to a person’s family. In general both a child and it’s parents should want the child to behave in ways that benefit the child’s personal reproductive fitness and to avoid behavior that harms their relatives’ reproductive fitness. However, as the child is (tautologically) fully related to itself while each parent only contributes 50% of each child’s genes there is the potential for parent child conflict over how moral/good/respectable the child’s behavior should be.
I don’t know if this generalizes across the human race, but the culturally assumed default is that children and teenagers want to be more adventurous than their parents want them to be.
I recently read Parent-Offspring Conflict by Trivers for my evolutionary psychology class. I strongly recommend it as it is one of the best readings from an already interesting class. Notably, it (partially) solves a problem I remember being addressed on Overcoming Bias in a way that I felt was unsatisfactory. Specifically, why parents encourage altruism and other pro-social values in their children. To summarize Trivers’ position on the subject, reciprocal altruism, retribution, and reputation are often extended to a person’s family. In general both a child and it’s parents should want the child to behave in ways that benefit the child’s personal reproductive fitness and to avoid behavior that harms their relatives’ reproductive fitness. However, as the child is (tautologically) fully related to itself while each parent only contributes 50% of each child’s genes there is the potential for parent child conflict over how moral/good/respectable the child’s behavior should be.
I don’t know if this generalizes across the human race, but the culturally assumed default is that children and teenagers want to be more adventurous than their parents want them to be.
Is lack of adventurousness part of altruism?
I wouldn’t consider it part of altruism, but it may be subject to the same dynamic.