Primate psychology - game playing in research

In dealing with the social psychology of primates and the evolution of altruism the issue of status was addressed and related to such things as grooming and food sharing among apes, and to food sharing and large-scale charity donations in humans. In the chapter on personality the issue of projection among humans was raised I think for the first time, in the context of one school of thought that personality traits, currently under investigation as possibly heritable (in nonhuman as well as human primates), are in fact mere fictions, projections from researchers on to the objects of their research. These disparate topics connected with my overdue intention to comment on the altruism experiments reported in the New Scientist (12th March 2005) article "Charity begins at Homo sapiens".

In the "ultimatum game" student volunteers were paired once only for the "proposer" to offer a portion of the cash sum, given to them for the game, to the "receiver". Both knew that if it was accepted both would keep the money while if it was refused both would lose. Contrary to expectations sums less than 25% of the total were regularly refused; this was seen as punishing unfair offers even at a cost, appropriate to evolutionary theories of reciprocal altruism with inherent checks against cheating.

But my response to all this type of experimentation is that it ignores the psychology of the participants as if each human being could be treated like the physicists hypothetical black box. What had those students learnt in childhood about sharing, what had they experienced with siblings and peers, what were they projecting onto the experiment, the person conducting it, or the partner? Of course they all came from the same culture, what would happen with volunteers from a different one, or with nonvolunteers? The particular issue that arose for me as a psychotherapist was the relevance of giving to dominance and control (in nonhuman primates labelled status). In general it is the superior who gives, the inferior who receives; the giver usually feels entitled to exercise some control or receive some deference/attention from the recipient. I have talked about my mother's controlling presents of money to me in my book. The students, like most people, would not be conscious of this but it would be working nonetheless. It would not just be a matter of fairness but a matter of not admitting inferiority, of "not letting someone else get one up on me", of "I'm worth more than that". The experiment had nothing to do with genuine altruism as the money was of no genuine significance to either of the game players. I think this type of experiment tells you more about psychological game playing than anything else. I realise that it could be argued that all these internal factors that I'm talking about could be said to be irrelevant mental constructs covering genuine genetically inherent tendency. Well that's true but I think observation of altruistic behaviour in populations of large, much more expensive and time-consuming, plus psychotherapeutic theory would provide a better theory because it gives a real practical origin for the evolutionary process, which game theory does not. All the factors that I've talked about go back to that first year of life, and the asymmetric mutual support of the mother/infant dyad. (Posted Sun 25th June 2006)