Is It Best to Be Greedy in Tough Economic Times?By Rodolfo
Mendoza-Denton | February 23, 2012 | 1 comment New research
suggests that evolution selects for altruism, not greed. There’s
a certain logic to the idea that greed is good when resources
are scarce: when there’s not a lot to go around, what could be
better than hogging the goods for oneself to ensure one’s
survival? If this logic were to hold true, one would expect
natural selection to have favored self-interested behavior as a
response to a lack of resources. In fact, however, new research
seems to suggest just the opposite. My colleagues at Berkeley
have found that across many indexes of self-interest, those with
fewer resources choose a strategy of sharing their limited
resources with others. In one example, the researchers had
upper- and lower-class individuals play a simple economic game,
in which generosity could be measured directly by the amount of
money that participants decided to give to an anonymous game
partner at their own expense. Lower