REFLECTING ON ALTRUISM IN EDUCATION

Contributions from evolutionary anthropology

Abstract

The nature of prosocial behaviours such as altruism, empathy and cooperation has been the subject of heated philosophical and scientific debates for a long time, and they are timidly beginning to enter the educational field.

This article refers to the recently published book Altruism and the Education of the Future: three experiences at the River Plate University Institute (Centineo, 2021) and has two main objectives: first, to briefly review the state of the art of the concept of altruism and then to describe the implementation and the results obtained from a pedagogical proposal based on altruism from Hardin's (1968) public goods dilemma. In this proposal, the gaming theory posed the dilemma of "cooperating or deserting" to students of the degrees in teaching and physical education within the framework of the Philosophy course. Specifically, students could donate their grades to the whole group or obtain their final marks in an evaluative instance. On this basis, a qualitative-quantitative analysis was carried out. Of a total of 194 (one hundred and ninety-four) students, most decided to donate their grades to benefit the group, and the final calculated average of the donors was higher than that of the non-donors. It is an interesting point from the gaming theory since (in the cases of a single iteration) selfishness is more beneficial than cooperation. Also, the general perception of the participants emphasized the importance of prosocial behaviours in the educational setting and the need to change the currently accepted paradigm.

Although the data are preliminary, we consider this project contributes to rethinking education from a more empathetic, cooperative and altruistic perspective, where evolutionary anthropology can contribute immensely.