The association between pro-social attitude and reproductive success differs between men and women

The evolution of pro-social attitude and cooperation in humans is under debate. Most of the knowledge on human cooperation results from laboratory experiments and theoretic modeling. Evolutionary explanations, however, rest upon fitness consequences. We therefore examined fitness correlates of pro-s...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inPloS one Vol. 7; no. 4; p. e33489
Main Authors Fieder, Martin, Huber, Susanne
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States Public Library of Science 09.04.2012
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Subjects
Adult
Altruism
Attitude
Attitudes
Behavior
Beliefs, opinions and attitudes
Biology
Breeding success
Cooperation
Correlation analysis
Data processing
Divorce
Education
Employees
Evolution
Female
Fertility
Fitness
Humans
Interpersonal Relations
Laboratory experiments
Longitudinal Studies
Male
Medicine
Men
Middle Aged
Offspring
Progeny
Psychology, Social
Reproduction
Reproductive fitness
Reputations
Sex Factors
Sexual Behavior
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Social Behavior
Society
Studies
Success
Wisconsin
Women
Wisconsin
Austria
Paraguay
United States > US
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Summary:The evolution of pro-social attitude and cooperation in humans is under debate. Most of the knowledge on human cooperation results from laboratory experiments and theoretic modeling. Evolutionary explanations, however, rest upon fitness consequences. We therefore examined fitness correlates of pro-social behavior in a real life setting, analyzing data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (n = 2545 men, 2967 women). We investigated whether pro-social attitude, proxied by self reported voluntary work, is associated with lifetime reproductive success. We find a sex difference in the association between pro-social attitude and offspring number. In men, a pro-social attitude was associated with higher offspring number, whereas in women, it was associated with lower offspring count. To our knowledge, this is the first study to demonstrate fitness consequences of pro-social behavior towards strangers. We conclude that analysing real life settings may help to explain the evolutionary forces leading to pro-social behavior in humans and speculate that these factors might differ between the sexes.
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Conceived and designed the experiments: MF SH. Analyzed the data: MF. Wrote the paper: MF SH.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0033489