The Banker’s Paradox is that a bank is least willing to help the person who genuinely needs help, because that person may be least able to repay.
However, a friend may help precisely when there is nothing to gain and no expectation of repayment.
So why does friendship arise at all?
Is it because friendship creates commitments that transcend self-interest — relationships in which we come to have shared interests greater than ourselves? Or is friendship ultimately a form of reciprocity, just one that doesn’t feel transactional?
And if friendship can take us beyond self-interest, what does that tell us about why we admire extraordinary acts of loyalty and self sacrifice?
Isn’t friendship about the joy of being with other people? Isn’t companionship and company one of the key pleasures of being human? I am aware, of course, that there are some people who do not have this disposition, owing to trauma, personal experience, or perhaps neurodiversity. But they are a minority. Most of people seem to like other people quite naturally and want to spend time with them. Hospitality is shared, and sometimes money or goods are lent or given.
Through an evolutionary lens, friendship isn’t the opposite of self-interest; it’s a long-term insurance policy written in ink that dried before we expected everyone to be a banker, if that makes sense.
We admire radical loyalty precisely because it proves that human beings are capable of rising above the simple math of this ledger.
The answer lies in distinguishing between the ultimate evolutionary function (why the trait evolved over millions of years) and the proximate psychological reality (how humans actually experience and feel it in real time).
Genes that caused early humans to form tight bonds survived better during crises (famines, injuries) than genes that led humans to be solitary or purely transactional. At the cold, genetic level, friendship exists because it yields a net survival payout over generations. That is the “insurance policy”.
How did natural selection actually get a self-interested organism to help a friend without stopping to calculate the odds of being repaid? It did so by deleting the accounting software from our conscious minds.
If an early human stood by a friend’s side only after calculating “What’s the probability this person survives and repays me?”, they would abandon that friend the moment things got truly dire—which is precisely when help is needed most.
To make the insurance policy work, evolution had to build a brain that rises above the ledger of survival and feels genuine love, empathy, and moral duty.
I think that is true and it is as far as evolutionary psychology will take us.
However it implies that loyalty and friendship result from an inadequacy of evolutionary design. We enter into potentially costly relationships as a consequences of blind impulses that are intended for a more limited purposes. It is in biological terminology an exaptation.
It does not seem to me very plausible as a full explanation because evolution is good at refining impulses, people are good at controlling excessive impulses and potential mates select against potential partners with poor impulse control.
I prefer to see the support we give to friends as an example of a value that arise as a consequence of our ground projects (Bernard Williams)
We select projects such as family and friends and we derive our values from them.
These are commitments that are sufficiently important to a person’s identity that they provide reasons for acting.
A person isn’t just a detached chooser who weighs up competing utilities. They have things that they are deeply invested in—creative work, relationships, ambitions, intellectual pursuits, etc. These projects help constitute who the person is.
This is why we help close friends when they need out help because they are part of our life project.
I would say that in a way there’s an “accounting” but it’s at relationship level, not transaction level.
So I help a friend, and I am not expecting the level of help I receive back to even out – that would be a business relationship. But sure; there’s an expectation that the willingness to help is at least comparable.
So if I help my friend with something that costs me $50, and then a month down the line he refuses to lend me $10, even though I can see he can afford it, it doesn’t feel like a friendship any more. (I know putting it in terms of lending money is crude but it makes explaining things clearer. Of course in reality a lot of help is not of the financial sort)
The self isnt a fortress. The choices dont come down to the old Hobbesian binary of EITHER narrow, narcissistic selfishness OR selfless altruism. There is no original default boundary between self and world, as though the self were a hoarder aiming at collecting as much of the world’s booty as possible within its private interior.
The self does want to expand itself into the world, but this is not fundamentally at the cost of others. What the self wants to expand is its ability to meaningfully assimilate the world as familiar, recognizable, controllable on the basis of likeness, similarity and consistency with respect to what the self understands. The young child only discerns an other as hostile other to the extent that the other resists assimilation.
We cannot help but love as ourselves the other who we are able to relate to, to participate with, whose behavior we can anticipate and trust in ways that are like our own. That knowable other amplifies and expands our sense of self rather than being a threat to it. The loved other we want to act generously toward and sacrifice for doesn’t turn us away from or ‘transcend’ self-interest, it is the intensification and enrichment of self-interest.
Its a bit general though. We don’t love everybody with whom we can empathise. Ultimately we are forced to make choices about who and what is most important to us. We may not want to choose but our capacities are finite.
It depends on what we love about the other, what we are able to empathize with in them, and the complex way in which these entanglements of empathy and affection are able to integrate themselves within the patterns of our daily life. Many accidental factors, such as opportunity for continued physical proximity, enable and enhance empathetic bonds.
Anyway I try to make sense of this statement, I think it is false. I don’t think the notion of “inadequacy of evolutionary design” is meaningful. Evolution selects for reproduction, and “designs” organisms solely by that metric. It is a truism that evolutionary design is adequate when judged by evolutionary metrics. I’m not sure what other metric we would use when accounting for the existence of a trait a species exhibits.
The point I was trying to make is that deep and lasting friendship is so fundamental to the human make up that its unlikely to be a byproduct of some other acquired capacity.
I think this is something people say often about traits that evolved. Famously the “irreducible complexity” of the human eye. Evolutionary psychology is tricky, because it always consists of some version or other of “just so” stories, but on the largest time scales, I don’t see how we can reasonably reduce it to anything but natural selection. I can imagine “just so” stories the go back to the split between mammals and reptiles, or even reptiles and fish (although it’s not really my area of expertise) that could account for friendship, ending in the sort of account @Thrifclyfe provided. Seeing as though something like “culture” is a result of such evolutionary forces and history, I can’t imagine any alternative, only a more fine grained answer.
I have made one suggestion which explains more features of friemdship than reciprocity alone
Other proximate causes could include an extension of kinship, sexual selection for prosocial behaviour, hedonism, status displays, memetics and gene culture co-evolution. None of which seek to deny the theory of evolution by natural selection.
Well there’s a couple of things there. If we’re broadening this to family then there are strong bonds and instincts that come into play.
But I would still say, that in terms of people at the end of their lives I don’t think that much changes. I mean, I have empathy for people who are dying, but that applies whether they are my friend or not.
Not usually, no.
Again with the emphasis that by “reciprocity” I just mean in terms of approximate commitment rather than number of times, dollar value, etc.
Concepts like friendship and romance need to be looked at under an entirely different lens as a whole. These aren’t transactional actions people commence with the mentality of opportunity cost calculation. Friendship and romance bring fulfillment and self-purpose to one’s life. It’s very easy to fall into an endless void of nihilism and a lack of goals, but finding people to love deeply and maintain relationships/dynamics with is one subconscious transaction. You give your everything but you also receive self purpose and proper meaningfulness to your life.
You’re are lucky or perhaps “normal” if friendship doesn’t feel transactional. I’ve always been painfully aware of my insufficiency regarding what others are looking for, the performance required, but perhaps that awareness is a problem of neurosis and poor self-image.
Often it feels easier to avoid relationships to escape the work/energy/reciprocity that they require to maintain. If you never want to do what your friends want to do, how could you possibly retain a healthy friendship.
The identity of a hammer is also conditioned by reciprocity. A rock will do in a pinch, but you desire what makes your job easier.
Thats fair, for some people its difficult to make and retain friends and for many people, including myself, there are times when its a challenge. We can only do what we are comfortable doing