Robert Trivers

Robert Trivers is an American evolutionary biologist whose theories explain social behavior through natural selection, including reciprocal altruism, parental investment, parent–offspring conflict, and self-deception.

Reciprocal altruism: A behavior that benefits another individual at a cost to the actor, with future return benefits making it evolutionarily advantageous. Trivers’s 1971 theory explained how cooperation can evolve between unrelated individuals.
The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism: A 1971 paper by Robert Trivers proposing conditions under which reciprocal helping can evolve. This paper introduced the theory that became one of Trivers’s defining contributions.
Edward O. Wilson: An American biologist who helped establish sociobiology as an evolutionary study of social behavior. Wilson’s sociobiology helped bring Trivers’s evolutionary explanations of social behavior into wider debate.
Evolutionary psychology: The study of psychological traits as adaptations shaped by natural selection. Trivers’s theories helped establish evolutionary explanations for social and psychological behavior.
Parental investment: The time and resources a parent devotes to offspring that reduce its capacity to invest in other offspring. Trivers used unequal investment to explain differences in mate choice and competition between sexes.
Parental Investment and Sexual Selection: A 1972 paper by Robert Trivers linking parental investment to sexual selection and sex differences in mating behavior. It established the investment-based account of mate choice associated with Trivers.
Richard Dawkins: A British evolutionary biologist whose book The Selfish Gene popularized gene-centered interpretations of evolution. Dawkins popularized several ideas associated with Trivers and acknowledged his influence.
Sexual selection: A form of natural selection driven by differences in mating success. Trivers’s parental-investment theory offered a prominent explanation for sex differences in sexual selection.
Self-deception: The process by which a person accepts a false belief while remaining unaware of its falsity. Trivers proposed that self-deception could help people deceive others by concealing signs of conscious lying.
Parent-Offspring Conflict: A 1974 paper by Robert Trivers developing an evolutionary account of disagreement between parents and offspring. The paper formalized the conflict between parental interests and each offspring’s interests.

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