e will to sacrice: sharing and sociality in humans, apes and monkeys

In our species the reciprocity principle is the basic ethic behind any society we know: you have to give in order to get, and to reciprocate what you receive. Such is the rule – the expectation or code, if you like – universally (Mauss [1925] 1990; Gouldner 1960; Høgh-Olesen 2006). Or as George Simmel (1950: 387) formulated it: “All contracts among men rest on the schema of giving and returning the equivalence.”