Hamilton's rule, introduced in the 1960s, says that altruism—helping others at your own expense—can evolve when the benefits to others, multiplied by how closely related they are to you, outweigh the ...

Your heart may be in the right place, but are your good deeds wreaking havoc? (Photo: Nadeen Nakib for Yahoo Health/Getty Images) Laurie Feldman used to be that mother — the one who redid her children ...

Effective altruism, which started as a small movement at Oxford University over a decade ago, is an influential and controversial philosophy backed by billionaires—including Facebook co-founder Dustin ...

Nature is full of animals helping each other out. A classic example is meerkat cooperation. When the group is foraging for food, one individual will head to a vantage point and keep watch for ...

Sociality, cooperation and “prosocial” behaviors are the foundation of human society (and of the extraordinary development of our brain) and yet, taken individually, people often show huge variation ...

February 2 marks the birth of one of the most praised and vilified writers of the past century — Ayn Rand, who sold over 30 million books. This makes it an appropriate time to reconsider her ...

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Though we don’t live in zoos, we often behave like animals. So many of our instincts are derived from our animal counterparts. Take the various forms of altruism as an example. In the animal kingdom, ...

In the 1970s, anthropologist Robert Trivers proposed the theory of reciprocal altruism, which argues that organisms provide a benefit to others only in expectation of future reward. But Trivers’ ...

If you believe there is no such thing as altruism, you are in good company. In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins writes that we must “try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish” ...

Having one's research ideas scooped is part of academic life. Today, for instance, I'd like to talk about some research quite similar in spirit to work I intended to do as part of my dissertation (but ...