If I may venture into armchair evolutionary psychology territory, this seems to verifiy that humans evolved and use altruism as a survival strategy. A person of lower status would have more to gain by investing in relationships through altruism than a person who is already of high status or wealthy.
I don't understand (or I am scared to understand?;). Do you mean we all evolved towards altruism? then this is contradictory, if we evolved (over 1000s of years) towards altruism then one can not modify instantaneously his evolved behavior depending contingently on if one belongs to the high or the low class. Or do you mean that the altruism "gene"(or whatever) is expressed only when one is in lower class? and that Altruism behavior is only expressed when survival is necessary, and is not a standard/general human behavior.
Perhaps the inherited altruistic behavior is only exhibited within ones tribe. So the rich will help each other, the poor will help each other, but the rich will only help the poor when they feel some sort of commonality. Since we only recognize altruism as charity when the recipient is poor, it follows that the poor are more charitable.
I don't see where the problem is with evolving context-specific altruism. We have numerous strategies that we evolved and use in specific contexts. Screaming, or crying or laughing for instance. Altruism could be another.
ok and that answers my question. Altruism as one item in our evolutionary library toolkit vs more deeply ingrained in our behaviors or even genes. My hope is that it is selfishness which is more an item in our library... that we evolved more towards being cooperators while still being able to defect (free-riders) some times...
