Rachlin: ALTRUISM AND SELFISHNESS: BBS Call for Commentators

[Stevan Harnad - Behavioral & Brain Sciences (Editor)]

Dear Dr. Connectionists List User,



        Below is the abstract of a forthcoming BBS target article


			ALTRUISM AND SELFISHNESS
				by

			   Howard Rachlin


http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Rachlin/Referees/

This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing
Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in
the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences.

Commentators must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To
be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other
appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS
Associate, please reply by EMAIL within three (3) weeks to:

                     calls at bbsonline.org

The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation
(indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment
on every occasion! Hence there is no need to reply except if you wish
to comment, or to nominate someone to comment.

If you are not a BBS Associate, please  approach a current BBS
Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar
with your work to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and
commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. A full electronic 
list of current BBS Associates is available at this location to help
you select a name:  

http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html

If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your
Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to
ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime,
your name, address and email address will be entered into our database
as an unaffiliated investigator.)

To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give
some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring
your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator.

To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for
this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the online 
BBSPrints Archive, at the URL that follows the abstract below.

_____________________________________________________________

ALTRUISM AND SELFISHNESS

Howard Rachlin
Psychology Department
State University of New York
Stony Brook, New York, 11794-2500

   KEYWORDS: addiction, altruism, commitment, cooperation, defection,
             egoism, impulsiveness, patterning, prisoners dilemma, reciprocation,
             reinforcement, selfishness, self-control

   ABSTRACT: Many situations in human life present choices between (a) narrowly
preferred particular alternatives and (b) narrowly less preferred (or aversive)
particular alternatives that nevertheless form part of highly preferred abstract
behavioral patterns. Such alternatives characterize problems of self-control. For
example, at any given moment, a person may accept alcoholic drinks yet also prefer
being sober to being drunk over the next few days. Other situations present
choices between (a) alternatives beneficial to an individual and (b) alternatives
that are less beneficial (or harmful) to the individual that would nevertheless be
beneficial if chosen by many individuals. Such alternatives characterize problems
of social cooperation; choices of the latter alternative are generally considered
to be altruistic. Altruism, like self-control, is a valuable temporally-extended
pattern of behavior. Like self-control, altruism may be learned and maintained over
an individuals lifetime. It needs no special inherited mechanism. Individual acts
of altruism, each of which may be of no benefit (or of possible harm) to the actor,
may nevertheless be beneficial when repeated over time. However, because each
selfish decision is individually preferred to each altruistic decision, people can
benefit from altruistic behavior only when they are committed to an altruistic
pattern of acts and refuse to make decisions on a case-by-case basis


http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Rachlin/Referees/

___________________________________________________________ 



Please do not prepare a commentary yet. Just let us know, after having
inspected it, what relevant expertise you feel you would bring to bear
on what aspect of the article. We will then let you know whether it was
possible to include your name on the final formal list of invitees.


_______________________________________________________________________

                *** SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENTS ***

(1) The authors of scientific articles are not paid money for their
    refereed research papers; they give them away. What they want is to
    reach all interested researchers worldwide, so as to maximize the
    potential research impact of their findings.

    Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View costs are accordingly
    access-barriers, and hence impact-barriers for this give-away
    research literature.

    There is now a way to free the entire refereed journal literature,
    for everyone, everywhere, immediately, by mounting interoperable
    university eprint archives, and self-archiving all refereed research
    papers in them.

    Please see:  http://www.eprints.org
                 http://www.openarchives.org/
                 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html

---------------------------------------------------------------------
(2) All authors in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences are
    strongly encouraged to self-archive all their papers in their own
    institution's Eprint Archives or in CogPrints, the Eprint Archive
    for the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences:

    http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/

    It is extremely simple to self-archive and will make all of our
    papers available to all of us everywhere, at no cost to anyone,
    forever. 

    Authors of BBS papers wishing to archive their already published
    BBS Target Articles should submit it to BBSPrints Archive. 
    Information about the archiving of BBS' entire backcatalogue will 
    be sent to you in the near future. Meantime please see:

    http://www.bbsonline.org/help/

    and

    http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/

---------------------------------------------------------------------
(3) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review

    In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able
    to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our
    limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make
    it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per
    year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and
    biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you
    would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review.

    (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the
    basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you
    indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you
    nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of
    potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential
    impact!).



*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Please note: Your email address has been added to our user database for
Calls for Commentators, the reason you received this email. If you do 
not wish to receive further Calls, please feel free to change your 
mailshot status through your User Login link on the BBSPrints homepage, 
useing your username and password above:

                       http://www.bbsonline.org/

For information about the mailshot, please see the help file at:

          http://www.bbsonline.org/help/node5.html#mailshot
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*