WHY SHOULD PEOPLE CARE ABOUT SHARING?

摘要

WHEN BRITISH-AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST COLIN Turnbull published The Mountain People in 1972, he dubbed his subjects-a Ugandan group called the Ik-"the loveless people." After two years of observations, he decided that they reflected humanity's basest instincts: adultery, thievery, and pitilessness. Two years later, physician Lewis Thomas recounted Turnbull's findings in The Lives of a Cell. "They breed without love or even casual regard," he wrote. "They defecate on each other's doorsteps." But when Athena Aktipis and her collaborators from the Human Generosity Project, a research network she founded in 2014 with Rutgers anthropologist Lee Cronk, took a deeper look, they identified a community that shared everything. "The general conception was that the Ik were horrible," says Aktipis, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University. But Turnbull had visited Uganda during a devastating famine. "All he saw is what happens when people are starving." Her teammate Cathryn Townsend's fieldwork revealed that despite living under pressure, the Ik placed a high value on helping one another when they could. Aktipis believes that altruism is more common-and beneficial-than evolutionary social science has long presumed. "A lot of existing work on our behavior is based on this decades-old framework that assumes people are designed to only do things to help themselves or their kin, or that they'll get paid back for," she says. By studying the unique, selfless practices that helped nine communities across the world endure, the experts from the Human Generosity Project are looking to show that we are indeed capable of widespread cooperation. Aktipis combines their long-term observations with data to quantify the outcomes of generous actions.