Summary

What makes some people more generous than others? And when it comes to altruism, how do we get more of it? In this episode, we learn about how altruism works in the brain, and the clues are surprisingly found in how psychopaths experience fear. Neuroscientist and professor Abigail Marsh will tell us what she's learned about altruism and the human brain.

About Our Guest

Abigail Marsh is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience at Georgetown University. She received her BA in Psychology from Dartmouth College in 1999 and her PhD in Social Psychology at Harvard University in 2004. Before Georgetown, she conducted post-doctoral work at the NIMH from 2004-2008. Her areas of expertise include social and affective neuroscience, particularly understanding emotional processes like empathy and how they relate to altruism, aggression, and psychopathy. 

Useful Links

Her book: The Fear Factor: How One Emotion Connects Psychopaths, Altruists, and Everyone In-Between

Published by Dr. Marsh in 2017 "What is responsible for the extremes of generosity and cruelty humans are capable of? By putting psychopathic children and extreme altruists in an fMRI, acclaimed psychologist Abigail Marsh found that the answer lies in how our brain responds to others' fear. While the brain's amygdala makes most of us hardwired for good, its variations can explain heroic and psychopathic behavior."

TED Talk: Abigail Marsh asks an essential question in her TED talk: If humans are evil, Why do we sometimes go to extraordinary lengths to help others even at a cost to ourselves?

Google Scholar: Has over 8500 citations from Abigail Marsh.

Twitter: Follow Dr. Marsh @aa_Marsh

Other Resources

Matthieu Ricard: Points out that empathy on its own can lead to fatigue and burnout.

Michael Krauss: Research shows that increased wealth can actually reduce empathy and altruism.

David DeSteno: People who've experienced significant trauma or natural disasters themselves benefit from self-efficacy, which gives them the confidence to know what to do in a situation they are familiar with.

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Business Ethics Field Guide: The ability to clarify individual and organizational values and to find a way forward when these values conflict. This book will help you develop those skills and apply them in your organization to become a better leader.

Classroom In Box: Do you teach ethics? Whether it's in a university, school, company, or agency you know how difficult it can be. Merit Leadership has compiled decades of award-winning experience teaching ethics and created lesson plans, videos, exercises, and assignments all in an online resource that's easy to use.

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You know, it's funny because I, I was telling my wife just last night, you

know, I have disagreements with adults all the time and we always work it out.

In fact, there's one associate that I work with.

We have a disagreement once a week.

You know, we always, but we always work it through and

figure it out and see eye to eye.

And I was like, why is it so much harder with teenagers?

But it's just, I mean, obviously I'm talking about one particular

teenager, but you get,

I do.

I do.

Yeah.

And I, you know, I feel like it's, I'm not a clinician myself, but

I've done some of the interviews.

So it is, it's much easier to be than when you're not related to them.

You know?

Like I find teenagers, a true joy.

I really enjoy talking to teenagers once they start opening up.

Right.

If you buy, if you, if you convinced them that you're clearly just

interested in them and you just find their experiences interesting.

And you're not going to like tell their parents what they said, then,

uh, I just find them so interesting.

I'm Aaron Miller, and this is How to Help, a podcast

about having a life and career of meaning, virtue, and impact.

This is season one, episode two, The Neuroscience of Altruism,

How to Help is sponsored by Merit Leadership, home of The

Business Ethics Field Guide.

If you're like me.

And let me just say that in this regard, the vast majority of you are like me.

You've never woken up some morning and said to yourself, you know what?

I have two kidneys.

I really only need one kidney.

I'm going to give the extra kidney to a total and complete stranger.

Now the reason I know that almost all of you haven't done this before is because we

know how many have it's usually around two to 300 people a year before the early two

thousands, the number was basically zero.

So this is still a relatively rare thing to donate a kidney to a stranger.

And yet the financial cost to a donor is basically zero.

And the health risk is also very low.

You'd have to stay in the hospital for a couple of days, but you'd be

back to normal in just a few weeks, of course, the recipient of a kidney

gets an entirely new lease on life.

And many years longer to live for many of us, it would be among the most high-impact

things that we could do with the amount of time and effort that's involved.

So why do some people donate kidneys while most of us don't?

This was the question that Dr.

Abigail Marsh and her colleagues have started to answer.

By looking at the neurological profile of these kidney donors, whom Dr.

Marsh calls extreme altruists and comparing that with the rest of us.

In studying this, she and her colleagues have revealed a lot about

altruism, how it works in the brain, what is really going on in our head

that makes us want to help people.

What makes extreme altruist different than everyone else.

And when it comes to altruism, how do we get more of it?

Dr.

Marsh is my guest for this episode.

She's a Harvard trained neuroscientist and a professor of psychology at

Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

She's also the author of the Fear Factor, a fantastic book that we'll be covering

in this episode, before we get into the neuroscience of altruism, I thought

it would help to have more context.

I asked Dr.

Marsh about misconceptions that people have about the study of our brains,

The biggest one, and I find this to be a problem when I'm communicating

with everybody from undergraduates to, you know, physicians with 30

years of experience is that every psychological phenomenon is also,

a neurological phenomenon, right?

There's every psychological phenomenon has some corresponding process

in the brain that supports it.

And if you knocked out that the part of the brain that's involved,

that psychological process would disappear or be grossly affected.

And I don't know why this is an issue that is so perennial, but I think it.

Once you start thinking about psychology this way as the, my favorite

way of describing the relationship between the mind and the brain is

the mind is what the brain does.

And I heard this from one of my mentors, Dan Gilbert at Harvard, but I don't know

who actually originally came up with it.

And that's really the easiest way to put it.

Anything that's happening in your mind is also happening in your brain,

because that is what the mind is.

It's just the output of the brains activity.

We can't always measure the brain activity that corresponds to

especially really complex psychological phenomenon, but it's always there.

And so when people ask me about things like altruism or psychopathy or empathy.

It's always very flushing of a neural process.

This explanation by Dr.

Marsh immediately gets us into some pretty deep philosophical waters.

If every thought or idea personality, quirk can be identified as a physical

process in the brain, then are we really choosing or our brains just

hardwired to make decisions for us?

That phrase hardwired is probably one you've heard before, or

maybe even you've used it.

You've probably also heard of brain plasticity.

The idea that our brains can adapt or change.

I asked Dr.

Marsh to explain these two things and how they relate.

I also hear people talk about the brain, even though there's, I

think people really understand a lot about the idea of plasticity in the

brain, how the brain is not a fixed phenomenon, like a car, but it's

constantly rewiring and retooling itself in response to environmental inputs.

So every time you learn something or every time you form a new memory,

your brain has changed structurally in a little tiny microscopic way.

That again, we can't measure very well by that experience.

So every experience changes your brain.

And if an experience causes you to then have new emotions in the

future, or to respond differently in the future or if it changes you in

any way, it has changed your brain.

That is the way that the emotion affected you or that the experience affected you.

And so I think that's also really important to remember

that the brain, almost nothing in the brain is truly hard wired.

The brain is able to change itself in response to experience

throughout the lifespan.

And so when I talk about phenomena like altruism or psychopathy,

corresponding to differences in the brain, I think unfortunately,

sometimes that gets misinterpreted as, Oh, well, then psychopathy is hard

wired in the brain, which it's not.

Psychopathy by the way, is the word for the category of

mental illness that's experienced by psychopaths and it like altruism and

all kinds of other attributes is not fixed in the brain, which means no

one is fated just because of how their brain works to live a psychopathic life

or an altruistic one for that matter.

We're headed into a deeper discussion of psychopathy and altruism.

So this context is really important.

It's the way the brain processes altruism that drew Dr.

Marsh to this field and drives her research now.

Neuroscience provides an especially powerful lens.

My initial interest in neuroscience was in part because, I'd felt so

frustrated in trying to answer the questions I wanted to answer using just

laboratories psychological approaches.

My core interest is in trying to understand the basis the origin.

The way it's possible for compassion and caring about

other people to emerge, right?

What is it that allows us to be able to care for other people, uh, presuming

we do, which I believe that we do.

And there's no way to answer that question without eventually get into

the neuroscience of it, because of course, again, the phenomenon of

compassion is the result of something happening in the brain, which we

don't quite understand what it is yet.

And I was trying to understand empathy, altruism, and aggression, to some extent

in my graduate studies, through laboratory tasks, you know, where I'd give people the

opportunity to donate money to somebody who sad story they'd heard in a recording.

The sad story of course, was retold by me and.

You can learn interesting and useful things that way.

I would never say we should not have laboratory studies, but it's really hard

to know how well they connect to the big, interesting kinds of behavior we see in

the real world, you know, life-saving heroic, rescues, and that sort of thing.

And I felt like you needed to try new techniques.

If you wanted to really think big about the origins of altruism.

Why the interest in altruism instead

of some other human attribute?

Well, that goes back to an experience that Dr.

Marsh had as a teenager, I'm going to paraphrase it from her book.

But you really just need to read it there, or you can hear her tell it in her Ted

talk, thanks to both her in the show notes, but this is what happened, Dr.

Marsh, or I'm going to call her Abby for this story was driving

home from Seattle to Tacoma.

After hanging out with a friend, it was a clear summer night around

midnight on interstate five, suddenly.

A dog ran out and cross right in front of her.

She swerved of course.

And the SUV that she was driving, went into a fish tail.

The car spun around violently became to a halt without hitting anything.

She was unharmed, but she couldn't have ended up in a more precarious position.

She found her so stopped in the fast lane facing oncoming traffic.

An arched over pass meant that any approaching cars wouldn't be able

to see her until it was too late.

The engine was dead.

Every indicator, light was flashing and try as she might, she couldn't

get the SUV to start up again.

It was only a matter of time before a car or even a semi-truck plowed into her.

And that's when he came, a stranger who came out of nowhere

and was knocking on her window.

This was a rough part of town too.

So his appearance made Abby even more anxious, but he took command of the

situation with a smooth confidence.

He took her place in the driver's seat, started the car

and navigated her to safety.

When he got out of the car, he made sure that she felt confident driving the rest

the way home, then he drove off in his own car, no name, no other connection to make.

She's never seen him again since that night, but I'm curious...

A need for any.

Follow-up or anything on my part, which now having done this kind of

work for a decade, I, I recognize a lot of those same traits and some

of the other people that I've worked with, you know, one of the very first

altruistic kidney donors in the country.

In fact, the first sort of known instance, if somebody's giving their

kidney to a stranger off the list, cause my, a woman, I had the wonderful,

good fortune to speak to in writing my book who was anonymous completely to

her recipient for, close to 20 years.

And I wonder if her recipient would have wanted to know what person that

saved her life, but I think it's right.

Yeah.

Although I have to say it's amazing.

There are individual differences with this too.

So there is some recipients who feel really uncomfortable with the idea that

a stranger has done something so big for them, and they, they really wrestle

with feelings of guilt and unworthiness and a lot of conflicted feelings.

So I've discovered that there's a sizable fraction of people who are saved by

strangers, who it gives them a lot of uncomfortable feelings and they don't

really want to meet or talk to the person who did this, which is too bad because I

bet they would feel better if they did.

Yeah.

Yeah, because people are so varied and complex, psychological

science often requires innovative methods for understanding the human mind.

How do you study something as nuanced as altruism?

One creative approach is to look at the opposite of what you're studying

and then you can see what's going on.

Well, what's the opposite of an altruist?

It's a psychopath.

Psychopathy is a diagnosable condition.

As Dr.

Marsh will explain.

And it can be observed as soon as early childhood.

We'll attempt to use neuroscience to understand the questions I

wanted to understand was to study kids, adolescents, mostly with a

psychopathic personality traits, which again is this clinical approach.

You're identifying a construct you're interested in, in this

case, compassion and care.

And then you find a population of people who seem to be missing

that phenomenon and you try to study what's different about them.

And then ideally what you'll.

Come up with whatever's different about them is the thing that creates

that construct you're interested in.

And this is exactly how we study memory and face recognition and

intelligence and all sorts of things.

It's really, in some ways, ideal to study adolescents with psychopathic

traits because well, for a couple of reasons, one psychopathy, which is

really just a personality marked by extreme callousness and lack of caring

about other people, a fair degree of narcissism, and true Machiavellianism.

And then also a kind of disinhibited personality.

You sort of tend to act before thinking it's a developmental disorders.

So the early signs of that are almost always evidence in very young childhood.

And then it tends to get dramatically worse than adolescents, which is the most

antisocial period of life in general.

And then as adolescents get older, they tend to have experiences that pile

up that affect their brains like long periods in detention or substance use.

And so the younger, the kids you study, the more, you feel a

little more comfortable, that what you're seeing is brain differences

that cause the psychopathy.

So we set out to study kids between the ages of about 10 and 17.

And, you know, people was like, Oh my gosh, how many kids are there that

are psychopathic in that age range?

And the answer is about the same as every other age range, which is about 1%.

So one and a hundred kids, maybe two have these traits.

And it was really a challenging study.

The families of these kids have a lot of burdens.

In addition, you know, these kids by definition are not really very caring

and compassionate, so they don't care about your research or you at all.

They just are usually motivated by the chance to get some money.

Which we were very happy to pay them in exchange for their time.

But you know, the armored research participant is actually

a more caring person than the average person we have learned.

Generally, people are unusually caring, people who sign up

to participate in research.

And so they try to do their best, right.

They try to keep still on the magnet so that they don't blurry

brain image at the end of it.

And when you're working with kids who are psychopathic, you

don't really get any of that.

You know, they don't stay still.

Oh, we lost so many kids that were know perfect participants in every way.

So they just couldn't or just wouldn't stay still on the scanner.

They often are running into trouble so frequently that they end up not able to

come in the day of their study because they ended up in detention the night

before, or they ran away from home.

Or we have more than one kid lost their parent out of the house when

it was time to come in for the study.

So that they couldn't actually come in that day.

That was it.

So it's a long list of things.

Although this episode is mostly about altruism and the brain.

I want to pause here and reflect on how hard it can be for psychopathic

kids and their families, because their behavior is by definition antisocial.

It's hard for us in society to respond to their cruelty with compassion,

but psychopathy is a mental illness and it's a huge burden on the

families that are dealing with it.

I asked Dr.

Marsh, what more we can be doing as a society to help.

Well, the first thing we need to do is just agree that it's a mental illness,

that the psychopathy is a brain disorder.

Every bit, as much as autism or schizophrenia or bipolar disorder,

nobody chooses to have these traits.

We know that like everything psychopathy results from a combination

of genetic environmental influences.

And the problem is that it's just really hard for people to hear or know

about somebody being hurt or somebody breaking a really serious rule and not

immediately turn the situation into a primarily moral situation where the

person who hurt somebody or broke a rule as bad and deserves punishment.

And that's a sort of an incompatible frame of mind with this person

is ill and deserves treatment.

And unfortunately, both stands are true for people who are psychopathic.

Yes.

They, you know, they should experience the consequences of their behavior,

but they also need treatment.

And we also need to learn how to prevent these symptoms from emerging.

And if we can do that, we will save society from an unbelievable

amount of suffering and pain because, you know, nobody wants to

be this way, you know, suffer from a lifetime of broken relationships.

Time in detention and nobody loves you and you don't love anybody else.

Wouldn't it be great to be able to prevent that if we could.

There are therapies for other conditions like autism,

they can help kids learn to read and follow social norms would this kind

of thing work for psychopathic kids?

Those strategies work really well.

Which is one reason society pours so many resources into making sure that

kids who are diagnosed with autism at a young age, get them because it makes

a huge difference in their outcomes.

I think someday we'll be able to do the same for psychopathy.

We'll be able to identify markers very early in life, come up with

effective parent training strategies.

Um, that can be used to really improve these kids' social, emotional processing.

And I think we'll be able to lift them just far enough above sort

of the risk threshold that we'll be able to change their behavior.

Long-term and I, that would be wonderful.

The problem with working with older people who are psychopathic

is mostly the narcissism, right?

They, they think they're the best people in the world.

So I've, you know, I've worked with teenagers who you know, have been

thrown out of multiple schools and their parents were afraid of them.

They didn't have any friends and they'd been in detention many times and all

the question we've been asked, all the kids we work with is, you know, how

would you rate yourself overall on a scale from one to 10, with one being,

I don't feel good about myself at all.

And 10 being, I feel amazing about myself and the average healthy

kid in the U S will usually answer with a seven or an eight.

I feel pretty good about myself, but there's room for improvement.

Right?

I think that's actually a very healthy response.

And these are kids who are generally doing pretty well and they're not alive.

Um, whereas the kids who was thinking about the trays would routinely

answer when you ask them how they feel about themselves at 10 or at 11.

And we had one kid say, and again, these are these kids

lives objectively a disaster.

Not that they don't have any good traits, cause they all do.

They all have lots of good traits, but things are not going well.

And the problem is, if somebody doesn't feel that room for

improvement in themselves, then they will not be motivated to do

any therapy to change themselves.

They think they're the ones who are the best already.

Right?

And so it's fundamentally a problem of motivation.

Now I've heard of interesting cases that people who are psychopathic, who claim

to have been not cured necessarily, but, but successfully treated to be

able to function really well in life.

And it came from an insight that they were screwing up their own life through

the way they treated other people that their own life would be much better if

they learn to treat other people better.

So let's get back to the neuroscience.

Now, what did Dr.

Marsh learn in her study of psychopathic teens?

To a significant degree, they all exhibited a common trait.

A reduced sensitivity to fear and not just their own fear.

What psychopaths share is a general inability to detect fear in others.

What's so unique about fear.

Fear is one of two kind of, you know, King or queen emotions.

That really are there, they're more fundamental, they're sort of simpler and

the neural architecture that supports them because they're so essential to survival.

The first is reward seeking, right?

Learning about things in the world that will yield rewards.

And the second, is harm avoidance, uh, which is fear and learning what kinds

of things are threatening and could hurt you and avoiding them in the future.

And it's just, you know, I mean, it is the Darwinian imperative is that you.

Is that you experienced fear and in order to prevent being killed.

And so I think it is an increase.

It is different fundamentally from emotions like sadness, to

some extent, even anger, which is a little more complex than fear.

Although also pretty simple love, certainly emotions like

that are much more complicated.

And so it's one of the fun things about studying fear.

You can really get your hands around it because it's pretty simple.

What's even more interesting about fear, I think, is that the way we recognize it

in other people as some unique features and has some in some ways simpler than the

way we understand other states and people.

On average, we're very good at seeing fear in others because

human faces broadcast it so effectively.

Try this right now, raise your eyebrows high and draw them together.

Making a wrinkle between them now open your eyes wide so that we can

see the whites of your eyes really clearly now stretch your lips tight

with, or without your mouth open.

These are the ingredients of a fearful expression.

And even when you do them on purpose, you can kind of feel the emotion of fear.

We not only feel it when we make that expression, but we also feel it when

we see the expression on others, it's part of our human ability to empathize.

What's really interesting about fear is that we understand

the neural pathways that support the experience of the emotion really well.

And so we've been able to determine that those same neural

pathways support, understanding the emotion and other people.

And so this is, I think been one of the coolest discoveries of the last decade

or so, and social neuroscience is that.

This is one of the key ways that we understand the experiences of other

people is by trying to simulate them, not, you know, not fully, right?

So when you see somebody else who's afraid, you won't necessarily feel

extreme fear yourself, but under the hood, you know, maybe even below the

surface of conscious awareness, your brain is trying to produce a sort of a

shadow or a simulation of that experience.

So will then allow you to interpret it and respond appropriately.

So what psychopaths lack is the ability to detect fear and others

and respond the way the rest of us do.

Is missing capacity for empathy comes with a whole host of terrible

knock on effects like callousness, narcissism, and a lack of inhibition.

What makes the rest of us not psychopathic is our empathy.

This brain simulation that we do when we see the emotions of others,

but empathy isn't enough on its own.

In the incredible book called altruism, Buddhist monk and neuroscientist Matthieu

Ricard points out that empathy on its own can lead to fatigue and burnout.

That is, if it isn't also accompanied by compassionate action, this

is where altruism comes in.

But how do you study altruism in the brain?

Can you scientifically identify people who are especially generous?

Just like you can identify psychopaths.

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Dr.

Marsh's fantastic idea was to study people who donate kidneys to strangers.

A group she calls extreme altruists.

As I mentioned earlier, there are a few hundred of these donations

to strangers performed every year.

So, what did she find?

Well, as psychopaths are mostly or completely unable to detect fear and

others altruists are far better at it than the average person, this heightened

ability to sense fear in other people is what helps them see a need to act.

But if they're better at detecting fear, why aren't they overwhelmed by it?

After all getting surgery to give up a kidney is intimidating.

How do altruists overcome the fear that they are so good at sensing?

Yeah.

So this is one of my favorite topics, right?

So, and this is one of the points I really think is incredibly important to remember

when you're thinking about altruism as incredibly important distinction

between being fearless and being brave.

And it's gotten to the point where I'm a little ridiculous and how

annoyed I get when people refer to altruists and heroes as fearless.

Yeah, because they're really not.

If you ask them about their experiences, helping other people, the people I work

with who donate kidneys to strangers are not people who are unafraid of pain or on

afraid of surgery or unafraid of dying.

You know, they don't tend to be fearless people on their walks of

life and what they are is brave.

And they wouldn't call themselves that almost ever, because they

don't experience that that way.

Where does this courage come from in extreme altruists?

They sense the fear, but what makes them act bravely in the

face of it to help someone else?

Well it's because of the human capacity for something called allomothering.

And this, I think gets to a really important point about how the brain

works, which is related to allomothering, which just means taking care of anyone

who's not your own offspring, allo meaning other, so what's so interesting

about the way the brain is built.

And mammals is that what's unique about mammals is that, of course we

have these very helpless offspring who need a huge amount of care and

protection and resource provision from their parents in order to survive.

And so our brains had to get built.

Especially females for most species, but in humans, very clearly both males

and females, our brains had to get built to, to care about the welfare

of other individuals and the region of the brain called the amygdala in

particular, the influence of a hormone called oxytocin within the amygdala.

Seems to be critical to especially caring about when others are in

danger, especially our own offspring.

And that particular region of the brain seems to be essential for responding

when somebody else is in danger for over coming for suppressing the desire to

protect yourself and replacing it with a desire to protect someone other than you.

And so if you don't have a well-functioning amygdala, like people

who are psychopathic, you are nearly, you are neither fearful to people

who are psychopathic or characterized by being relatively fearless.

Nor are you interested in helping others who are in danger, or who are afraid.

And so the capacity for fear is actually essential to being brave when it comes

to helping others who are in danger.

And it seems to be the parts of the brain that give us the

ability to be good parents that allow that transition to be made.

So what's happening with altruism is we have this ability

to detect fear in others and feel it ourselves, but then have that fear

overcome by the presence of oxytocin.

And that's what makes us show care.

Well, this process doesn't work the same in everyone.

What factors change our capacity for altruism?

And they do vary a lot.

People seem to become more altruistic as they get older.

So if you, look at behaviors like altruistic kidney donation, you see a

lot more of it and people who are middle aged and older than you do when people

who were younger, although not zero, I've worked with some altruistic kidney donors

in their late teens, but just as a trend.

You definitely see lots of personality variation.

So people who are altruistic kidney donors also tend to be the sort

of people who help others in need and various other ways, including

animals, including young children.

The science of this brings up some really

deep philosophical questions.

If altruism is desirable, which I think we believe it is, it

varies across personalities

and people.

Can we even do anything to get more of it?

Can we choose more of it?

Dr.

Marsh firmly believes that we can, but we need to better understand

what helps us make that happen.

One of those things is seeing how altruism can lead to a virtuous cycle.

It turns out that on average, the better off the society is

the more altruistic it can be.

So, and geographic regions where people say they're

flourishing, you tend to see.

More, for example, altruistic kidney donation, blood donation,

charitable donation, volunteering, all these things tend to go together.

And that's kind of cool because it suggests that when people

are in the position to, to help, that's what they naturally do.

I like that.

And it's better than the Faustian bargain I would have to make, if

it turned out that flourishing made people less likely to help others.

Cause then you'd have to choose between the two, but it doesn't seem like you do.

I had to jump in here because research by Michael

Krauss, Docker, Keltner, and others have shown that increased wealth can

actually reduce empathy and altruism.

Basically the wealthier we are, the less we encounter and relate

to the suffering of others.

Wealth also makes people feel entitled to act in more selfish ways.

Studies have even shown, that when you put average people in nicer cars, they're

less likely to stop for pedestrians than if you put them in less expensive cars.

So how does this square with Dr.

Marsh's research that shows that increased prosperity leads to increased altruism?

Well, the better way to think about this is that altruism is

not tied to excess wealth, but to flourishing, flourishing is deeper

and more meaningful than just money.

If you look at large representative samples of the population, you tend

to find this very close tracking between people's wellbeing.

They're feeling that they're flourishing feeling like they have purpose in

life, feeling their needs are met and altruism towards strangers.

And we've recently seen this in a study.

We did looking across countries as well.

And this is even when you co-vary out every other, you know, demographic and

objective variable that you can think of.

And it is strange, right?

Because it suggests that like, you know, the uber wealthy will be the

most altruistic and that that's not actually what the data means.

I guess we don't study that uber-wealthy we studied, you know, the top 10% or

something like that versus the middle 10%.

And probably the deal is that altruism does require you

to have a view of the world.

That's fundamentally optimistic, that people are generally good and

worthy of helping and would help you if you needed help yourself.

And most people I've worked with who are altruistic kidney donors

do have that view with people.

Right.

Because otherwise, if you encounter some random stranger, you know, nothing

about the one thing you have to think, if you're going to help them as this

person deserves to be helped, which does require a sort of fundamental optimism

about people and something that like demographers and social scientists

have known for many decades is that when people have experienced like

really a lot of difficulties in their life circumstances, you tend to see an

increase in cynicism and misanthropy, which is not at all surprising,

you know, it makes perfect sense.

Um, but unfortunately it can, you know, have some unfortunate downstream effects.

And so I think what the reality is that there's sort of a critical combination

of feeling like you are, you know, you were in a position to help other people

because of your own good fortune and having had enough positive experiences in

your life that you still feel like people are generally good and worthy of helping.

Not that I'm passing judgment on whether or not that's true objectively,

it's just, you know, it's, it's an assumption that underlies altruism.

It's not just flourishing in your life, that

prompts you towards generosity.

It's also having been through hard times and during difficult experiences

has the ability to deepen our empathy and our instinct for compassion.

As long as our suffering didn't turn us into cynics.

But also, I do think that the people within that sort of large group

who are the most altruistic are people who have experienced extreme suffering,

who really understand what it means to suffer, to be afraid, to feel pain.

And so I think that's the critical combination.

We generally see is that people who are genuinely report that they're

flourishing in their life, but have also had significant experiences of pain and

suffering, I think do tend to be the most impathic because they have, they feel

like they have the resources to give.

They do have some fundamental optimism.

But they also understand what it means to really suffer and they, so they can

empathize and are motivated to help.

And they also feel a sense of self efficacy.

So this is really interesting work done by David DeSteno showing that

people who've experienced significant trauma or natural disasters themselves

benefit from the self-efficacy that that experience gives you a feeling like,

you know, what to do in that situation.

Up to this point, we've already learned so much from Dr.

Marsh about altruism.

But there's another mechanism that we need to talk about.

It's a very deeply human part of the way altruism works.

It has to do with the way we think of ourselves in Western cultures,

especially there's this dominant idea of individualism that each of us has

starkly distinct from each other, self, as we might define it is me and

me alone, but in practice, this isn't really how we think about ourselves.

We consistently wrap others into our definition of self,

through the relationships that we have with one another.

For example, I'm a husband because of my spouse.

I'm a father because of my children.

I'm a teacher because of my students.

They all make up part of who I am.

Surely this has some effect on my expressions of altruism or compassion.

Oh, man, this is one, this is, this is my current

obsession, this particular topic.

How is it that we decide that others are part of our sort of self concept

that we, that we perceive overlap between ourselves and others.

And this is clearly something we're built to do is to think of ourselves as.

As fundamentally connected to others around us.

You know, we are the, the boundary of the self that has never ended

at the surface of our skin.

I mean, you were full of microbes.

We were embedded in communities without which we couldn't survive.

We're fundamentally embedded in the world that we live in.

And so we're, and our brain knows this.

Our brain does not think that boundary of ourself and at the, at the boundary

of risk, And how does that happen?

A lot?

We don't know.

There is some interesting evidence that actually the amygdala and oxytocin's

effects within the amygdala are essential for making that self other distinction,

which makes sense, because of course, this is a phenomenon that's intrinsic to,

for example, becoming a parent, is this, you know, brand new being that has never

existed before a plops into the world.

And you have to immediately decide that that other organism is so very much a part

of yourself that you will do anything to promote it's welfare and you obviously can

distinguish between it and your yourself.

Right.

You know, treat it as though it was actually you, but it has to become a

very much a part of your own identity.

And so clearly this is something where we're very good at it and can

do in some cases, almost instantly.

Can we somehow enhance our ability to feel more

connected to others to make it feel like they are part of us.

There are lots of ways that we can do it.

It's sort of in the here and now, other than having a baby what's

one sort of tried and true method and probably the most successful

is simple, positive social contact.

It's amazing how familiarity breeds, tends not to breed in

town to actually tends to breed.

Mostly positive feelings.

The better you get to know somebody in general, unless they're just a real

jerk, which there are some of those, but if they're not tend to like the

better, and this is one of those things that I think in the current moment

in time is so incredibly important.

As we're trying to learn how very diverse groups of people can get along

better, positive social contact, right?

We have to just, we have to be together and spending time doing things together

that are mostly positive and that will inevitably breed better understanding

and more liking, which is so important.

And we also know from social psychology, that one of the best kinds of things you

can do with others to form a coherent identity is work on collaborative projects

together and work towards a common goal.

When you do that with people, I think it's, I think there's

something really interesting in how the brain determines what itself

is versus what someone else does.

And it has a lot to do with prediction, right?

If you can predict an outcome.

In the world, you tend to incorporate that thing you

predicted into your sense of self.

And so when we're working with other people as a team, especially people

who are very familiar to ourselves, we can often predict what they're going

to do or say before they do or say it.

And I think that's really intrinsic to feeling like the other person is

almost like a part of your own self.

You know, a part of your own identity is that, you know what they're going

to do as almost as well as, you know, what you yourself are going to do.

Yeah, this is why people, most people give kidneys.

Most people, the vast majority of people who give kidneys, give them

to very close relatives to their parent or child or spouse or sibling.

And those people are very much embedded in the concept of ourselves.

And so the value of a kidney, whether it's in your own body or whether

it's in the body of somebody that you love so much that they, they

do feel like part of yourself.

I mean, why do we say when those people die, that if we've missed

it, we missing a part of ourselves.

It's because they're so embedded in the concept of self.

And so if that same kidney has an editable impact on our own welfare,

but it would save their life.

It just is an obvious choice to most people.

It's just like, Oh my God.

Like if this person.

We're gone.

It would be like, you know, a little, a death to a part of myself.

So obviously the kidney is better over there than it is over here.

And then of course, what's so interesting about the really extraordinary

altruist is that they seem to feel that way even about strangers.

They really they're the concept for them.

This their sense of self is even broader than the average

person, which is pretty cool.

So do you think humanity is headed that direction

where we have more extreme altruists or more extreme altruism, so to

speak more altruism for strangers?

I absolutely do.

I mean, it's so clear that that people feel this way much more now than they

did decades ago, that it, you know, the reason people get so bummed out when

they're watching the news is because they really care about the fate of strangers.

And, you know, who'll, they'll never meet and places.

They've never been, you know, millions of miles away.

That's really amazing.

That we've gotten to the point where, you know, for you or me, like the plight

of people who, you know, are in Beirut.

For example, this week, it really moves us.

We don't know them.

We may not speak their language.

We, you know, why do we care about them?

And, you know, arguably a hundred, 200 years ago, people

would not have cared at all.

Oh, that would have been like, Oh, well that's too bad.

You know, I wouldn't have wished it upon them, but I don't feel for them.

And now we do.

And I think it's because of the way that we live, we encounter much wider diversity

of people we're living in a world that's more peaceful than it used to be.

And so we don't view.

Life as it is it just a series of, you know, winner take all contest between

warring sociopolitical groups and we, you know, countries rely on each other.

People within those countries rely on each other for our daily

survival in large diverse groups that are much bigger than those sort

of relatively small collectives.

And most people lived in for most of human history.

And I think it's making us feel like the fate of strangers is

more embedded in our own faith.

There are so many lessons to learn from all of this,

but here at the end of the episode, I want to dwell on this one idea.

You are not you alone.

There's so much more to you than that.

The secret is defined more of yourself and other people.

We grow in a very real and meaningful way in the connections that we form with

others as they become part of us, we make much more of ourselves, but it's

up to us to make those connections.

And as you can see, our brains are prepared for these connections.

The opportunities we have to give are abundant, and they don't even

require you to give up a kidney.

Though you could do that too.

The point is that when you offer part of yourself to someone else

in a very real way, you're getting more of yourself in return.

You become a person that matters to another human being, just as

they matter to you, your connection expands, who you are in a way

that you couldn't do on your own.

Many many thanks to Dr.

Abigail Marsh for taking the time to talk with me.

It was a delightful conversation.

Do make sure that you watch your Ted talk and definitely check out her book.

The Fear Factor we've linked to both of these in the show notes.

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Next time, we'll be talking with David Williams.

He's the former CEO of the national Make-A-Wish foundation, former COO of

habitat for humanity, former executive director of the Houston area food bank.

And currently he's the CEO of Genesis works.

We're going to be talking with him about what he's done his

entire career, giving people hope.

Thanks, Merit Leadership who sponsors this podcast and to our production team, which

included Cindy Hall, travis Stevenson, yours truly, and Eric Robertson,

who did the editing and the music.

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If you want to use their music in your projects, you can find a link

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Finally, thank you so much for listening.

I am Aaron Miller and this has been how to Help.