Michael Tomasello

Quotes From

Why We Cooperate (2009)

• I do not believe that human altruism is a single trait, but rather that humans are more or less altruistic in different domains of activity, each of which has its own characteristics.#
• In the case of an intrinsically rewarding activity, external rewards undermine this intrinsic motivation—they externalize it to the reward.#
• Most human imperatives are not commands, e.g., “get me water,” but rather something more indirect, such as “I’d like some water,” which is just a statement of desire. I can get water by informing others of my desire because they are so cooperative that simply knowing my desire leads them automatically to want to fulfill it.#
• Children soon learn to lie also, but that comes only some years later and presupposes preexisting cooperation and trust. If people did not have a tendency to trust one another’s helpfulness, lying could never get off the ground.#
• Human children seem to be more generous than chimpanzees. But here, again, I would emphasize that this is only a matter of degree. Starving humans are not so generous with food, either. It is just that chimpanzees act as if they were always starving.#
• Enforcing norms is an act of altruism, as the whole group benefits from my attempts to make the transgressor shape up.#
• Guilt and shame are kinds of self-punishments that serve, first, to make it less likely that I will engage in the same transgression in the future, and second, to display to others that I indeed hew to the norm, even if I did not live up to it in this case. . . . Guilt and shame are thus biologically based emotional reactions, which presuppose the kinds of normative (or at least punitive) social environments that humans have constructed for themselves. They are thus particularly good exemplars of the co-evolutionary process between human biology and culture.#
• Advertising my eye direction for all to see could only have evolved in a cooperative social environment in which others were not likely to exploit it to my detriment.#
• Imitation and conformity can create high degrees of intra-group homogeneity and inter-group heterogeneity, and on a faster time scale than that of biological evolution.#