According to every story that we are told about ourselves, left to our own devices, without the taming influence of religion or a social contract, we would act according to our true natures — cold-bloodedly and entirely for self-preservation. “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism,” writes British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, “because we are born selfish.”
From this perspective, altruistic behavior appears to be errant behavior or an error in judgment. After all, acting unselfishly out of concern for the interests of others, regardless of the personal consequences, can be deleterious to the self and even reduce the possibility of survival. Altruism makes no logical sense, because it is potentially an act of purposeful self-destruction. In a zero-sum game, it is deliberately choosing the shorter straw.
Most biologists also argue that doing for others is usually carried out ultimately for selfish ends — what’s usually referred to as the social-exchange theory — which claims that people behave unselfishly toward each other only if the benefits of doing so outweigh the risks. Evolutionary biologist Michael Ghiselin put it more unsentimentally: “Scratch an altruist and watch a hypocrite bleed.”
Or they reduce altruism to an equation, measuring its cost or benefit in terms of its bearing on an organism’s number of offspring, or “reproductive fitness.”
The problem with the selfish gene theory, and indeed all theories attempting to rationalize altruism from the point of view of survival, is the vast number of exceptions to the rule.
A basic drive for cooperation and partnership, even sacrifice, rather than selfishness and naked survival, appears to be intrinsic to the biological makeup of all living things. Animals of all persuasions carry out an enormous coterie of actions that have no raison d’être other than to help those less fortunate or maintain the cooperative social glue.
Animals often partner up with members of unrelated species; badgers and coyotes often form pairs to hunt. Animals within the same groups form buddy systems, in which the more successful hunter helps the less fortunate. In the wild, vampire bats who have had a successful feeding spree on cattle routinely regurgitate the blood, which they will donate to those among their group who have been less successful.
Many species of animals employ alarm and information systems about danger and food, even when this endangers them. Ververt monkeys use alarm calls to warn other monkeys of impending attack, even though raising the alarm can increase their own chances of being harmed.
There are even instances of one species adopting another.
An automatic impulse to help appears to have its genesis in our internal programming to protect our young, as Joshua Green and Jonathan Cohen, two Princeton University psychologists, discovered when studying the brain signaling of witnesses to films of victims of violence. The network of neurons in the brain that lit up during the process of witnessing another person being harmed were related to caring, the same ones that fired when mothers were shown photographs of their babies. Caring about others, even strangers, is automatic and basic to our biology.
In fact, a desire to help is so necessary to us that we experience it as one of our chief pleasurable activities. A team of neuroscientists from the National Institutes of Health and LABS-D’Or Hospital Network in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, discovered that receiving a big monetary reward or making large charitable donation both activate the same portion of the brain, the mesolimbic reward pathway, a primitive system that gets aroused during eating or having sex, plus an additional section of the brain, the subgenual cortex/septal part — associated with bonding and social attachment. This would suggest that an impulse to do something altruistic is inherent in our need for connection.
James Rilling and Gregory Berns, two American neuroscientists at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia decided to observe the real-time behavior of the brain during an altruistic act by employing fMRI scanners to record the brain activity of a group of women as they took part in a game called “Prisoner’s Dilemma’.
“Prisoner’s Dilemma” is a classic psychological game used to assess levels of cooperation between two people. In the most typical version of this game, the two participants are told to pretend that they are arrested for robbing a bank and placed in separate cells isolated from each other. At this point the police don’t have enough evidence to convict either one, so the prosecutor pays each suspect a visit and offers them a deal.
Each of them can rat on the other (called “defect” in the game) or remain silent (“cooperate” with the other). If one of them betrays the other, while the other holds his tongue, the stool pigeon will only have to serve two years in jail while the silent one will get a maximum sentence of ten years.
If both confess, they’ll be convicted and have to serve five years. If both remain silent, they’ll only be charged with possession of firearms and both will be released after only six months in jail.
Rilling and Berns were fascinated to discover that mutual cooperation was the most common outcome, even though individually each player stood to make the safest choice if he or she defected from her partner.
What’s more, when the partners cooperated, both demonstrated activation in the caudate nucleus and anterior cingulate cortex – the same area of the brain activated when people receive rewards or undergo a pleasurable experience. Working cooperatively with someone else literally was its own reward.
“It suggests that the altruistic drive to cooperate is biologically embedded,” said Berns.
Being selfless ultimately is the most self-serving option because it feels so good to give.
