What kind of person would donate their kidney to a complete stranger? Pull over on a highway to help a random person fix their dead engine? To Abigail Marsh, professor of psychology at Georgetown University, real-life hero would.
But what compels this behavior? And how can we increase this altruistic behavior? These were the big questions that Dr. Marsh investigated and made the subject of Carnegie Mellon’s first Carl & Amy Jones Lecture in Interdisciplinary Science on Sept. 27, called “The Biology of Heroism.” Her research suggests that heroes, or more formally altruists, exhibit more inclusion of others in the self.
There were a few other important questions Dr. Marsh wanted to answer. First, are people fundamentally selfish?
“If you happen to believe people are fundamentally selfish, you are in very good company, historically speaking,” Dr. Marsh said. Quotes from philosophers such as Aristotle, Aquinas, and Hobbes seem to suggest beliefs that human beings act out of selfishness. In the modern day, it seems that many people agree: In a 2018 survey by the Pew Research Center, 47 percent of respondents said that most people can’t be trusted, and 62 percent of respondents said that most people look out for themselves rather than help others.
But despite these statistics, Dr. Marsh presented evidence that people are not fundamentally selfish; in fact, people were becoming more altruistic. Selfish traits like narcissism, manipulation, and deceit align with psychopathic traits, and Dr. Marsh’s lab found that psychopathic traits in people vary throughout the population — they lie on a distribution. “The very existence of a distribution of psychopathic traits logically requires that human nature cannot be selfish,” Dr. Marsh said.
Another reason that might convince people that everyone is fundamentally selfish is the bystander effect. The bystander effect is the psychological concept that the more bystanders witnessing a crime, the less likely it is that any bystander will help. But real world evidence may contradict this: Dr. Marsh cited a 2020 international study of CCTV footage that shows in 90 percent of recorded instances, one or more bystanders helped in dangerous situations.
To illustrate how people are becoming more altruistic, Dr. Marsh presented a paper about decades of research on public good games, economic simulations that look at selfish versus cooperative decision-making. The paper found that over time, people have become more cooperative and altruistic in these games. Dr. Marsh also cited a paper illustrating how the total amount of money given in charitable donations has increased over the years. Moreover, Dr. Marsh’s lab found that health, general well-being, and life satisfaction also seem to be rising globally.
Dr. Marsh proposes that despite evidence to the contrary, people believe humans are becoming more selfish because of negativity bias. We tend to remember bad headlines more than good headlines, and there is so much information nowadays that we end up remembering a lot of negative information.
In order to examine what actually makes people heroes, a Ph.D. researcher from Dr. Marsh’s lab, Shawn Rhoads, distinguished prosocial behavior, which involves helping others, into three categories: altruism, cooperation, and fairness. Altruism, which is the behavior of heroes, is voluntary and requires sacrificing resources to increase someone else’s welfare. Cooperation is aimed at maximizing mutual resources, and fairness aims to satisfy social rules of equity and only sometimes requires sacrificing resources.
The researchers at Dr. Marsh’s lab then brought in their altruistic research participants, kidney donors, to investigate several potential predictors of altruism. Dr. Marsh said she had worked with kidney donors for over 12 years because “it’s such a stringently defined form of altruism. Altruistic kidney donors make a voluntary, costly, somewhat risky choice to benefit an anonymous stranger. They don’t know who’s going to get their kidney, and it’s illegal for them to benefit in any way. Everyone benefits from the donation, the surgeons, the hospital, the insurance company, the patient, but the altruist cannot.”
One of the main traits that people might associate with these altruists is empathy, that they empathize with the people who need these kidneys. Researchers at Dr. Marsh’s lab were interested in this possibility and looked into surveys for empathy like the Interpersonal Reactivity Index or reading of the minds test, but they found that the empathy scales didn’t seem different in the altruists versus their control group at all.
“This is pretty clear evidence that whatever the self-report empathy scales like the IRI are measuring is not that closely associated with altruism,” Dr. Marsh said. “Now it could be that empathy is associated with and even causing altruism. We just have to measure it some other way.”
After not much success with surveys and self-report data on empathy, they switched to brain imaging research. They had altruists and their control group look at emotional facial expressions, and found that not only were altruists better at recognizing fearful expressions outside the brain scanner, but when they examined the brain imaging data, they found that the altruists’ amygdalas were more responsive to fearful expressions. “We know [the amygdala is] a very complicated structure, ” Dr. Marsh said, “but it is critical for learning about and expressing fear in particular. And what I think it’s essential for is simulating other people’s fear.”
To further investigate this idea, the lab performed a study in which participants watched a stranger they had met for seconds have their thumb hit, then watched their own thumb get hit. They found altruists had brain activity in regions associated with pain both when they were watching the stranger’s thumb get hit and when they were watching their own thumb get hit, and these brain activities were highly correlated. On the other hand, the brain activities in these circumstances weren’t correlated for control participants at all. This implied that the altruists could be experiencing stranger’s pain much more than the average person, so “if we define empathy as attempted simulation, [as in] I’m trying to imagine what your experience is like … then indeed altruists are showing more empathy,” Dr. Marsh said.
But this correlation did not prove that empathy causes altruism — there was no guarantee that improving everyone’s empathy would cause more people to do good in society. So they added another condition to their study where the researchers asked participants to imagine the anticipatory fear of the person before their thumb was smashed, and also to imagine the pain of the person when their thumb was smashed. They found that this request completely eliminated altruists’ and controls’ differences in brain activity during the pain condition, though there were still differences during the fear condition.
“I had to think about this result for a little bit,” Dr. Marsh said. “To me what this suggests is that the average person can empathize at least with other people’s pain. [But] there seems to be something different about fear. … Empathy isn’t the prime mover — something deeper about altruists is causing them to empathize more with strangers’ pain and distress in daily life.”
Dr. Marsh proposes based on other relevant studies that instead, it’s the feeling of care towards other people that compels people to empathize with other people. Average people can “empathize just fine, but they only do empathize for people who they care about, somebody who’s close to them versus a stranger. … How much you care about the person’s welfare, how much their pain intrinsically matters to you comes before empathy.”
But this implies then that altruists care about a lot more people, even strangers, than the average person does. Ph.D. researcher Kruti Vekari in Dr. Marsh’s lab proposed “perhaps the single most reliable behavior correlate of real-world altruism,” called social discounting. Social discounting is how much you care about people at different degrees of social distance from you. For example, in the scenario Dr. Marsh’s lab asked participants, if you won a sum of money, you might be willing to split a lot of money with someone close to you like a family member, a best friend, or a spouse. But the further that person is from you, say a friend of a friend of a friend, the less money you might be inclined to split with them. In other words, you discount the welfare of people further away from you.
While most people wouldn’t care too much about a complete stranger’s welfare, Dr. Marsh’s lab found that when they gave altruists the money-splitting scenario, altruists discounted the value of strangers much less than most people would — altruists valued the welfare of a complete stranger, people with a social distance from them of 100 degrees, more than an average person valued the welfare of a friend, people with a social distance from them of 20 degrees. This trend held up in the lab’s later studies with bone marrow donors, liver donors, humanitarian aid workers, and heroic rescuers.
Other studies like ones in Steve Chang’s lab seem to imply that the reason that altruists care so much for other people is because altruists encode the welfare of people differently in the amygdala — they found populations of cells in rats’ amygdala that specifically encode for others’ welfare.
So how do we increase altruistic behaviors? While Dr. Marsh didn’t have a concrete answer to this question, she believed that we need to work on increasing how much people care for other people. Many studies were able to increase altruistic behaviors, though only for short periods of time. Research also suggests that increasing people’s well-being did increase altruistic behaviors — people who have the psychological and physical resources to help others would do so. “And why is that? It’s because people are not fundamentally selfish,” Dr. Marsh said.
But even in high global well-being, some negative emotions like acute anxiety can actually boost altruism — researchers including Dr. Joana Vieira found that during the COVID-19 pandemic, acute anxiety was a predictor of helpful behavior such as everyday helping. Dr. Marsh believed this suggests that anxiety could motivate us to help those in need.
Dr. Marsh believed that these results were comforting, telling us that while news and literature like Lord of the Flies might seem to suggest that humans are fundamentally selfish, there is perhaps something out there that can durably improve altruism, aside from increasing anxiety, which seems unethical, or improving global welfare, “because that’s a really big lift,” Dr. Marsh said. “We just need to keep looking.”
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