Nice Guys Finish First: The Competitive Altruism Hypothesis

By Charlotte L. Hardy, M. van Vugt. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2006

841 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Three experimental studies examined the relationship between altruistic behavior and the emergence of status hierarchies within groups. In each study, group members were confronted with a social dilemma in which they could either benefit themselves or their group. Study 1 revealed that in a reputation environment when contributions were public, people were more altruistic. In both Studies 1 and 2, the most altruistic members gained the highest status in their group and were most frequently preferred as cooperative interaction partners. Study 3 showed that as the costs of altruism increase, the status rewards also increase. These results support the premise at the heart of competitive altruism: Individuals may behave altruistically for reputation reasons because selective benefits (associated with status) accrue to the generous.

Subfields: Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2aca30e90f636a117d7283f13ee47ada0bef32d8

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Citations in the corpus

Toward a Unified Science of Hierarchy: Dominance and Prestige are Two Fundamental Pathways to Human Social Rank (2014, background): “…and aggressive, high in personality dominance, tall or strong, have wide faces and deep voices, and assume spatially expansive postures, tend to rise to the top of hierarchies; and why other highly-ranked individuals gain influence by instead demonstrating skills, expertise, and generosity.”
Rocking the Boat but Keeping It Steady: The Role of Emotion Regulation in Employee Voice (2013, background): “In her seminal work, Hochschild (1983) identified two different emotional labor strategies that employees use to regulate emotions: deep acting and surface acting.”