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© 2013 Brañas-Garza et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

Gene-culture co-evolution emphasizes the joint role of culture and genes for the emergence of altruistic and cooperative behaviors and behavioral genetics provides estimates of their relative importance. However, these approaches cannot assess which biological traits determine altruism or how. We analyze the association between altruism in adults and the exposure to prenatal sex hormones, using the second-to-fourth digit ratio. We find an inverted U-shaped relation for left and right hands, which is very consistent for men and less systematic for women. Subjects with both high and low digit ratios give less than individuals with intermediate digit ratios. We repeat the exercise with the same subjects seven months later and find a similar association, even though subjects' behavior differs the second time they play the game. We then construct proxies of the median digit ratio in the population (using more than 1000 different subjects), show that subjects' altruism decreases with the distance of their ratio to these proxies. These results provide direct evidence that prenatal events contribute to the variation of altruistic behavior and that the exposure to fetal hormones is one of the relevant biological factors. In addition, the findings suggest that there might be an optimal level of exposure to these hormones from social perspective.

Details

Title
Second-to-Fourth Digit Ratio Has a Non-Monotonic Impact on Altruism
Author
Brañas-Garza, Pablo; Kovářík, Jaromír; Neyse, Levent
First page
e60419
Section
Research Article
Publication year
2013
Publication date
Apr 2013
Publisher
Public Library of Science
e-ISSN
19326203
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
1330894841
Copyright
© 2013 Brañas-Garza et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.