Kin and non-kin cooperation in China

Abstract

The fact that people in China and elsewhere cooperate, in various senses, with their close kinfor example, that Chinese parents make sacrifices for their children with an eye on the future, or that Chinese siblings do things together for mutual benefit across the lifecycleis not very surprising.From an evolutionary point of view, it could be said to make good sense. What is more surprising, one could say, is the fact that people in China and elsewhere cooperate so much with non-kin, and even with total strangers. To be clear, both of these factsi.e. the fact of cooperation with kin and the fact of cooperation with non-kinare scientifically important and have been investigated and heavily theorized, most famously in Hamilton's Rule and subsequent contributions to kin selection theory (Hamilton 1964a(Hamilton , 1964b Birch & Okasha 2013). There has also been a great deal of back and forth among scholars about what 'cooperation' actually consists in and how it might have evolved in humans and other species (West et al. 2006;Amici 2015). But it has primarily been the secondif you like, more surprisingfact of cooperation with non-kin that has generated a huge amount of theoretical and empirical work across a wide range of disciplines in recent decades.To give an example: experimental economists, inspired by game theoretic approaches, have studied how people behave when asked to divide money with others under a given set of rules (for a critical overview of this field, see Guala 2005). One broad finding is that on average people are surprisingly 'cooperative', in the sense that they will give money to others even when the rules of a particular game allow them to be as selfish as they like. Notably, however, virtually all such research examines cooperation between non-kinin fact, it is primarily about cooperation between total strangers who do not even meet in person for the sake of the experimental tasks. To give another, very different, example: developmental psychologists, by means of an ingenious set of studies, have shown that human infants and children are readily disposed to cooperate with others (for a general introduction to such studies, see Tomasello 2009). More specifically, they have better skills and dispositions for cooperation than do our close primate relatives. But, again, the bulk of such