Both psychologists and evolutionary biologists have had a long love affair with economics. But like many infatuations, this particular love affair has occasionally led us astray.
Economic models have been very successful in helping us understand important financial phenomena such as market pricing and supply and demand. So, first flirtations with economics often assume that market principles can also help us understand how people exchange goods and services with everyone—not just the grocer and the appliance salesperson, but also our coworkers, neighbors, friends, and lovers.
One principle embraced by economically-oriented psychologists and biologists is reciprocity: If you do me a favor, I will feel compelled to return that favor. From an evolutionary perspective, reciprocity is often presumed to explain cooperation between people who do not share common genes. In a dog-eat-dog world, helping my brother promotes the survival of someone who shares my genes. So, helping family members doesn’t pose a puzzle. If I help someone to whom I am not related, though, that could enhance my genetic fitness only under more limited circumstances. Helping a nonrelative only works if (a) my genetically unrelated friend and I exchange favors over a prolonged period and (b) I can expect him to help me when I am in need.
Recently, I read a book by anthropologist Dan Hruschka, Friendship: Development, Ecology, and Evolution of a Relationship. Hruschka makes a powerful argument that human friendship is not, in fact, based on reciprocity. The book is impressive in integrating ideas and research findings from anthropology, evolutionary biology, and psychology. Hruschka searched the anthropological archives for evidence about friendship in other human societies, looking carefully at 60 societies chosen to represent the diversity of traditional societies from different corners of the globe (including hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, and people living in small rural agricultural communities; see the map below.)
Hruschka describes the Ju/’hoansi hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert, for example, who practice a system called hxaro, which involves gift-giving and mutual aid between friends. Hruschka also describes the Maasai system of gift-giving, which is called osotua, as well as the Kula ring relationships formed by residents of the Massim islands in New Guinea. Many of these systems have been previously described by others, but Hruschka weaves the stories together into a cohesive whole picture of friendship across our species.
Based on his extensive research, Hruschka concludes: “close friends violate many of the rules proposed for maintaining reciprocal altruism. Close friends eschew strict reciprocity…” By this, Hruschka means friends are reluctant to count and keep track of what they get from, and give to, one another.
If friendships aren’t about reciprocity, though, what are they based on? Hruschka argues the operative principle is instead need. In the Maasai osotua system, I will give to a friend based solely on that friend’s need. And I will not expect repayment. Indeed, the Maasai think it is crude to even bring up the notion of debt or repayment with reference to friendships.
Decades ago, Margaret Clark and Judson Mills astutely pointed out that explicit exchange characterizes only some of our relationships, and not others. If a coworker is making a run to the local sandwich shop at lunchtime and asks if you want anything, it is perfectly appropriate for you to give them $5.50 to cover the sandwich. If they were to say, "No, it’s on me,” you would likely feel the need to reciprocate, perhaps by buying the coworker an equivalent sandwich tomorrow. But if you are dating someone, and they surprise you by bringing you your favorite sandwich, offering to pay them $5.50 would send them a message that the relationship is not going so well.
Clark and Mills labeled relationships between casual acquaintances, in which people keep an account of what they put in and what they get out, exchange relationships. In contrast, they labeled more intimate relationships communal relationships. In communal relationships, there is no strict accounting, and benefits flow “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs,” to borrow a line from Karl Marx.
It is not that friends don’t reciprocate at all, or that we don’t notice if a relationship becomes terribly imbalanced. Rather, real friends do not keep detailed nickel-and-dime accounts of what they do for one another. Furthermore, counting or paying for benefits are usually inappropriate in close friendships. My friend, Steve Neuberg, and I have eaten lunches together for over a decade now, and we do in fact take turns paying for those lunches. But neither of us ever remembers whether this week’s bill is vastly more expensive than last week’s, or whether the other always chooses the most expensive item on the menu. In fact, neither of us can ever remember whose turn it is.
My colleague, Athena Aktipis, has worked with Lee Cronk to study the Maasai osotua system, and when I asked if she had any advice about friendship from an evolutionary perspective, one of her suggestions was, “If your friends are in need, help them. If you're in need ask your friends (risk pooling is part of the function of friendship).” Hruschka’s review of friendship around the world suggests that this is good advice even if you’re not a Maasai. It seems that, no matter what society you live in, friendships work better following the rules of socialism and not capitalism.
I've explored the different economic rules that apply to different relationships in a book with Vlad Griskevicius: The Rational Animal: How evolution made us smarter than we think (which I described briefly in The evolved wisdom behind our seemingly stupid decisions).
For Further Reading
Hruschka, D. J. (2010). Friendship: Development, ecology, and evolution of a relationship. Berkeley: Univ of California Press
Kenrick, D.T., & Griskevicius, V. (2013). The rational animal: How evolution made us smarter than we think. New York: Basic Books
Aktipis, C. A., Cronk, L., & de Aguiar, R. (2011). Risk-pooling and herd survival: an agent-based model of a Maasai gift-giving system. Human Ecology, 39(2), 131-140.
Douglas T. Kenrick is a professor of social and evolutionary psychology at Arizona State University.
This blog is adapted from a blog by Douglas Kenrick that originally appeared in Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sex-murder-and-the-meaning-life/202006/true-friendships-are-communistic-not-capitalistic