Friendship is transactional, unconditional friendship is insurance

The things that are given in a friendship are things that when you give them, you still have them. This is unlike buying a loaf of bread, where I am little concerned to support the baker, nor he me.

Start of post:

Friendship is transactional [...] we befriend people because we get something out of it

End of post:

I think that humans instinctively execute good game theory because evolution selected for it [...] My claim here is that forming unconditional attachments as a behavior makes sense for insurance-like game theoretic reasons, and that explains why us humans are so into them.

I think these statements have two different meanings. The first is about looking at the individual alone, and seeing "what internal causes lead to what behaviors?" The second is about looking at the individual in the context of the history of the universe, and asking "what caused those internal causes? (an evolutionary process)"

It's the same difference between "pursuing one's values because it's what they care about", and "caring about it in the first place because long ago evolution selected for a certain space of minds". [LW · GW] E.g., it would be false to say that I only care about others so I can survive, even though caring-for-others was the surviving policy.

That said, I do think it could also be true that normal humans subtly expect friendships to be transactional, in a way that's really reducible to some internal cause in them, that they're not aware of by default. Parts of your post are about this instead, and I think those parts are valid, to the extent normal-humans are really like that.

But as for myself.. I don't think about my friendships that way, and if I introspect I see things like 'mutual fun seeking', which by your account is transactional, but.. it doesn't feel like this: "I'm doing this just so I have fun. Them having fun too is just a side effect, and they feel the same about me." We actually care about each other intrinsically.^[1]

I agree that evolution probably embedded some 'shards of personal-gain-seeking' in our psychology around friendships, but if so I don't endorse that, and I wouldn't choose to embrace that aspect of reality and conclude 'friendship and love are fundamentally about transaction': I'd treat it as just another bias to try to avoid. A hypothetical version of me in a future utopia would read this post, reason through the above, and then conclude: "But I don't want to be like that, and my ideal world isn't like this, so I'm going to change my psychology."

1. ^{^}

   If 'caring about each other' is also labelled as self-interested, then I would say that your argument is secretly the philosophical position of psychological egoism, being applied to the particular case of friendships.

Philosopher Dan Williams^[1]'s recent post titled "Socialism, self-deception, and spontaneous order" contains some relevant commentary^[2]:

Humans are intensely cooperative. Why? What motivates individuals to help and assist others? Why are people often so friendly, generous, and fair-minded?

Genuine altruism plays an important role among close family members. For well-known evolutionary reasons, organisms can propagate their genes by helping relatives who share copies of those genes. This is why the most intense cooperation typically occurs among relatives, and extended kinship networks are such a common form of social organisation.

However, most human cooperation is not altruistic; it is mutualistic. Outside the family, people cooperate for mutual benefit—to achieve fitness-relevant goals they could not achieve independently.

For example, we cooperate for reasons of interdependence. In many contexts, we depend on—that is, have a self-interested stake in the survival and success of—others, so we benefit ourselves by helping them. Although the concept of interdependence makes many people feel warm and fuzzy, it has a harsh logic: if we do not depend on others—e.g., because they are a rival, outsider, or burden—motives to help them often disappear.

We also cooperate so that others might return the favour. This includes long-term reciprocal relationships between spouses and friends, as well as community-wide (“indirect”) reciprocity whereby people aid others so that someone (not necessarily the specific person they helped) will return the favour. Such community-wide cooperation is typically scaffolded by social norms and gossip, which emerge because people personally benefit from designing, enforcing, and conforming to norms and from spreading and consuming juicy tittle-tattle about people’s behaviours and misdeeds.

Relatedly, we cooperate to improve our reputations and win esteem. People benefit from being seen as virtuous, norm-abiding community members. A good reputation is socially rewarded, protects people against collective punishment, and makes them more attractive mates, friends, and allies. Given this, self-sacrifice, benevolence, and generosity are often reputationally lucrative, which explains why—paradoxically—people sometimes compete to be more cooperative than others.

---

A striking feature of research on the evolution of human cooperation is that the explanations it identifies—for example, mutual benefit, interdependence, reciprocity, reputation, and prestige—often bear little resemblance to people’s own understanding of their cooperative behaviour.

I am not making the trivial point that people are oblivious to the evolutionary reasons for their actions. Even if people’s prosocial instincts are ultimately rooted in the fitness benefits of cooperation, such Darwinian rationales are always distinct from people’s proximate motives. For example, people typically have sex not to reproduce but because sex feels good, even though the Darwinian reason sex feels good is to encourage reproduction. Likewise, people care for their children not to propagate their genes but because they love their children, even though the Darwinian reason for parental love is that it helps people propagate their genes.

Mutualistic cooperation is different: it is not just the Darwinian rationale for cooperation that clashes with our self-understanding but the proximate motives driving our behaviour. Because mutualistic cooperation functions to promote individual self-interest, people are generally motivated to cooperate only when doing so is personally advantageous. That is, unlike sex or the well-being of their children, people do not place a non-instrumental value on mutualistic cooperation; it must be incentivised.

[...]

Nevertheless, when people describe their cooperative behaviour, they almost never acknowledge this situation. They depict self-interest as irrelevant to their friendliness, fair-mindedness, and generosity. The help others because others need help, because they care about the “common good”, because it is “the right thing to do”, and so on. They value cooperation not because it constitutes a personally advantageous strategy; they value it as an end in itself.

Once again, the point is not that this self-conception is a lie. People sincerely—indeed, passionately—believe such stories. Moreover, we have evolved to cultivate prosocial traits and dispositions that make such stories plausible. Because it is costly to appear like calculating and selective cooperators, we often cultivate robust prosocial instincts designed to appear uncalculating and unselective. Nevertheless, just like press secretaries are highly skilled at painting their client’s behaviour in the most attractive light, the stories we tell—and believe—about our motives for cooperation are designed not for accuracy but to paint our behaviour in ways that make us look good.

1. ^{^}

   Who, somewhat unrelatedly, is a fellow of the LCFI

2. ^{^}

   And is worthwhile to read anyway.

Other possible frames for this phenomenon:

• I stand by friends, even when the transaction portion is no longer beneficial, because that is a virtuous thing to do.
• I love/befriend unconditionally because that's what people who I admire (mostly fictional, honestly, but still...) do.
• I remain friends with (some) people who no longer help me, because it increases my status with others.

All of these kind of fit your insurance/game-theory model, but they feel very different from inside.

Note that I don't think this dynamic needs to be very conscious on anyone's part. I think that humans instinctively execute good game theory because evolution selected for it, even if the human executing just feels a wordless pull to that kind of behavior.

Yup, exactly. It makes me think back to The Moral Animal by Robert Wright. It's been a while since I read it so take what follows with a grain of salt, because I could be butchering some stuff, but that book makes the argument that this sort of thing goes beyond friendship and into all types of emotions and moral feelings.

Like if you're at the grocery store and someone just cuts you in line for no reason, one way of looking at it is that the cost to you is negligible -- you just need to wait an additional 45 seconds for them to check out -- and so the rational thing would be to just let it happen. You could confront them, but what exactly would you have to gain? Suppose you are traveling and will never see any of the people in the area ever again.

But we have evolved such that this situation would evoke some strong emotions regarding unfairness, and these emotions would often drive you to confront the person who cut you in line. I forget if this stuff is more at the individual level or the cultural level.

I don't think human behaviour and relationships are reducible to economics like that.

It seems like you're pretty much starting from the axiom that economic calculus has to be at the bottom of everything, and any behaviour that isn't explicitly game theory has to be an abstraction/higher level implementation of it.

That's just not how people work.

Evolution didn't happen bottom up from an economics textbook. Behaviour that results in "winning" outcomes gets propagated. You can examine those from the perspective of economic theory, but economic theory isn't the origin.

There doesn't need to be a hidden "econ 101" subroutine that obfuscates itself.

The much simpler explanation is that unconditional relationships have been adaptive and beneficial, if not for the individual then for the group, just as being deceptive about ones commitment to others can be a competitive advantage.

Something tells me that the selective pressure to keep "the tribe" alive has been a much more fundamental factor for the evolution of human social behaviour than the pressure to attain a resource advantage over our peers.

Therefore, I think genuinely "unconditional" relationships existing is the much more likely explanation.

("Unconditional" with the exception of the other side defecting in substantial ways. These relationships can be broken, but only if the underlying belief gets falsified).