Ömer Faruk Alişan
@omeralisan
Doktor
Malatya Fen Lisesi, Ankara Üni. Tıp Fakültesi
Rize, Fındıklı
Rize
26 okur puanı
Mart 2023 tarihinde katıldı
Both chimpanzees and human children learn from others. In many cases, social learning optimises an action’s outcome – we achieve our goals better if we focus on what others do. It is characteristic of us humans to adopt even seemingly superf luous components of a complex behaviour pattern. Humans are hyperimitators. For example, a study comparing two-yearold children’s learning with chimpanzees showed that human children adopted a technique even when it was actually less efficient than an alternative.37 The task was to use a rake-like tool to reach a desired object (such as a sweet). The rake was presented to the test subjects – the chimpanzees or the children – with its teeth pointing downwards. When the rake was handed to them like this, it was hard to reach the object, which often slipped through the teeth due to its size. Human children performed the task as an adult demonstrator had done – with the rake facing downwards, making it more difficult. Many of the chimpanzees spotted this disadvantage and simply turned the rake over. Slavish imitation of others’ actions – often misleadingly derided by us as ‘aping’ – is typical of humans.
Along these same lines, cultural evolution can consist of a blend of careful imitation and constructive modification that perpetuates and preserves its essence while experimentally improving it.
In cities, people live closer to each other, and there is closer contact between humans and animals than there would otherwise be. Urban life has therefore always been the ideal breeding ground for epidemics and plagues. As a result, increased disease resistance and higher immunity rates are found in populations whose history of urbanisation goes further back. City living reinforced a genetic ability to better resist disease.
Selection pressure, to which the vast majority of organisms are subjected in an uncontrollable natural environment, is now applied by a self-made environment. The better our ancestors adapted to a thoroughly cultural way of life, the better their genes were represented in the next generation.
This is precisely the question Fehr and Gächter asked. They set up an experiment putting together several groups of four participants, each equipped with a certain amount of money (in this case, twenty Swiss francs or ‘monetary units’). For several rounds, the participants were able to decide how much should be contributed to the public pot. The payment options were regulated so that it was most worthwhile for the individual to make no contribution at all, or only a very small one. For the whole group, however, it was better if everyone always put in the maximum. Six rounds were played, with the following results: the participants’ willingness to cooperate – represented as the average contribution thrown into the public pot per round – started weak and soon fell sharply. By the end of the sixth round, the players kept most for themselves. Only when they played the game a second time were the participants given the opportunity to ‘punish’ the meanest players. For every monetary unit spent by one player on punishing another uncooperative player, three monetary units were deducted from the player who was punished. The effect on the overall willingness to cooperate was spectacular: by the end of these six rounds, the level of cooperation had reached almost the maximum possible (the maximum being the result if everybody behaved cooperatively all of the time). Punishing individuals who refuse to cooperate therefore solves the problem of freeloading, at least in an experimental setting.