Promoting Well-Being in Health Care

Abstract

The conference on “Man the Hunted: Sociality, Altruism, and Well-Being,” brought together research from a number of domains to examine and challenge a prevailing assumption among anthropologists studying primate behavior and human origins, namely that early human beings were savage, violent hunters who exhibited little, if any, cooperation or prosocial behavior beyond what was necessary for basic survival. This view has many implications for our understanding of human nature. In this chapter, we examine and note the further challenges to this assumption from the viewpoint of research in modern medicine and health care. From this viewpoint, we now understand that cooperative and nonviolent be..