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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Published in | PloS one Vol. 7; no. 4; p. e33489 |
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Main Authors | , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
United States
Public Library of Science
09.04.2012
Public Library of Science (PLoS) |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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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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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 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 |