Abstract
The accounts of prosocial behavior advanced by traditional social psychologists can be expanded, refined, and deepened by embedding them in an evolutionary framework. Attributing helping behaviors to such processes as social learning, the internalization of norms, responses to situational variables, cognitive construal, and emotional reactions leaves at least three important questions unanswered—what do these determinants have in common, how did they originate, and why do they induce people to behave in prosocial ways? Evolutionary theory generates the expectation that the determinants of prosocial behaviors studied by social psychologists stem from mental mechanisms that originated in archaic environments whose function was to help early humans solve adaptive problems and foster their fitness. Evolutionary theorists have postulated that biological forms of altruism can evolve in four ways: through sexual selection, kin selection, group selection, and the misfiring of evolved mental mechanisms such as those that mediate social learning. Psychological altruism is a qualitatively different phenomenon from biological altruism.
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Krebs, D. (2015). Prosocial Behavior. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Welling, L., Shackelford, T. (eds) Evolutionary Perspectives on Social Psychology. Evolutionary Psychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12697-5_18
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