Induced Altruism in Religious, Military, and Terrorist Organizations

Human altruism in non-kin, unreciprocated contexts is difficult to understand in evolutionary terms. However, neo-Darwinian theories remain a potentially useful means of illuminating this behavior. In particular, induced altruism, wherein cues of genetic relatedness are manipulated to elicit costly behaviors for the benefit of non-kin, appears highly relevant. This article reviews cross-cultural data on several examples of extremely costly altruism-vows of celibacy, suicide bombings, and combat suicide-as exhibited in organizational and institutional contexts. Two predictions are used to test the relevance of induced altruism to the reinforcement of altruistic commitment to these behaviors. First, different organizations requiring costly sacrifice by their members should employ similar practices involving patterns of association, phenotypic similarity, and kinship terminology that are associated with kin cue-manipulation. Second, these organizational practices should be adopted as a consequence of recruit pools growing increasingly larger and, thus, less genetically related. There appears to be support for both predictions, suggesting that cross-cultural analyses could provide an effective avenue through which to test this and other evolutionary theories related to human unreciprocated altruism in non-kin contexts.