The emergence of hyper-altruistic behaviour in conflictual situations

Situations where people have to decide between hurting themselves or another person are at the core of many individual and global conflicts. Yet little is known about how people behave when facing these situations in the lab. In Studies 1 and 2 participants could either take a certain amount of money from an anonymous person or donate the same amount to that person. While all known economic models predict the selfish outcome, 25 % of subjects acted altruistically. Adding the possibility to exit the game at zero cost, led 70 % of subjects to choose it. However, this positive effect of the way out vanished for ways out with a small cost. Across all way-out conditions, females were more likely than males to choose the way out. In Study 3 subjects faced a three-person conflict where they had to decide between hurting themselves or either of two anonymous people. Again, 25 % of subjects sacrificed themselves in the no-way-out condition, the majority of them took the way-out in the free-way-out condition, and females were more likely than males to take the way out. These findings challenge all known economic models and suggest that females might be more suitable than males in handling human conflicts. Humans are spectacular in their capacity to help others and build relationships: sharing food and cooperating during hunt have played a fundamental role in the early evolution of human societies[1] and modern variants of these attitudes play a major role still nowadays: we help friends when they need, we make donations to less fortunate people, we collaborate with our partner to build a family, we cooperate with our colleagues to finish the work faster and at higher standards. As a consequence, our social network is far more connected than that of any other animal species. While this dense spatial structure has numerous well known positive consequences, it also generates a painful paradox: with all the people we are connected with, it is often difficult to make everyone happy: sometimes the goals of two people are just not aligned; sometimes we have to choose between hurting Person A or hurting 1 a