Sexual Selection of Human Cooperative Behaviour: an Experimental Study in Rural Senegal

Overview

Journal PLoS One

Specialties General Medicine
Science

Date 2012 Sep 18

PMID 22984503

Citations 7

Authors

Arnaud Tognetti

Claire Berticat

Michel Raymond

Charlotte Faurie

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Human cooperation in large groups and between non-kin individuals remains a Darwinian puzzle. Investigations into whether and how sexual selection is involved in the evolution of cooperation represent a new and important research direction. Here, 69 groups of four men or four women recruited from a rural population in Senegal played a sequential public-good game in the presence of out-group observers, either of the same sex or of the opposite sex. At the end of the game, participants could donate part of their gain to the village school in the presence of the same observers. Both contributions to the public good and donations to the school, which reflect different components of cooperativeness, were influenced by the sex of the observers. The results suggest that in this non-Western population, sexual selection acts mainly on men's cooperative behaviour with non-kin, whereas women's cooperativeness is mainly influenced by nonsexual social selection.

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