THE ALTRUISM HIERARCHY
THE ALTRUISM HIERARCHY
BY JAMIL ZAKI Assistant professor of psychology, Stanford University
Human beings are the unequivocal world champions of niceness. We act kindly not only toward people who belong to our own social groups or can reciprocate our generosity but also toward strangers thousands of miles away who will never know we helped them. All around the world, people sacrifice their resources, well-being, and even their lives in the service of others. For behavioral scientists, the great and terrible thing about altruism—behavior that helps others at a cost to the helper—is its inherent contradictions. Prosocial behaviors appear to contradict economic and evolutionary axioms about how humans should behave: selfishly, nasty and brutish, red in tooth and claw, or whichever catchphrase you prefer. After all, how could organisms that sacrifice for others survive, and why would nature endow us with such self-defeating tendencies? In recent decades, researchers have largely solved this problem, offering reasons that perfectly self-oriented organisms might behave altruistically. Solving the “altruism paradox” becomes trivial when individuals help family members (thus advancing helpers’ genes) or others who can reciprocate (increasing helpers’ chances of future gains) or others in public (enhancing helpers’ reputations). We see these motives at work all around us—in parenting, favors for bosses, opera patrons donating just enough to get their names on the donor plaque in the lobby. More recently, my colleagues and I, as well as other neuroscientists, uncovered another “selfish” motive for altruism: Helping others simply feels good. It engages brain structures associated with reward and motivation, like those that come online when you see a beautiful face, win money, or eat chocolate. Further, this “reward-related” brain activity not only accompanies giving but also predicts people’s willingness to give, suggesting a tight link between pleasure and generosity. This doesn’t mean that altruism is the psychological equivalent of Ben and Jerry’s, but it does provide converging evidence for UC San Diego economist James Andreoni’s idea that generosity produces a hedonic “warm glow.” One common response I receive when presenting this work has grown increasingly bothersome. Often an audience member will claim that if people experience helping as rewarding, then their actions aren’t “really” altruistic at all. The claim, as I understand it, traces back to the Kantian notion—embedded in the “cost to the helper” part of altruism’s definition—that virtuous action is motivated by principle alone, and that benefiting from that action, whether by material gain or psychological pleasure, disqualifies it as virtuous. Often this contention devolves into long, animated, and (to my mind) useless attempts to find space for true altruism amid an avalanche of ulterior motives. This altruism hierarchy—with a near-mystical “true” altruism residing somewhere in the distance and our sullied attempts at it crowding out real life—is widespread. It also plays a role in matters of judgment. A recent study by George Newman and Daylian Cain of the Yale School of Management demonstrates that people judge people as less moral when they act altruistically and gain in the process than when they gain from clearly nonaltruistic behavior.m In essence, people view “tainted altruism” as worse than no altruism at all. The altruism hierarchy should be retired. I believe that people often help others absent the goal of any personal gain. The social psychologist Dan Batson, philosopher Philip Kitcher, and others have done the philosophical and empirical work of distinguishing other-oriented and self-oriented motives for prosociality. But I also believe that the reservation of terms such as “pure” or “real” for actions bereft of any personal gain is less than useful—for two reasons, both of which connect to the broader idea of self-negation.First, the altruism hierarchy is logically self-negating. Attempts to identify true altruism often boil down to redacting motivation from behavior altogether. The story goes that in order to be pure, helping others must dissociate from personal desire (to look good, feel rewarded, etc.). But it’s logically fallacious to think of any human behavior as amotivated. De facto, when people engage in actions, it’s because they want to. This could represent an overt desire to gain personally, but it could also stem from previous learning (for instance, that helping others in the past has felt good or provided personal gain) that translates into an intuitive prosocial preference. Disqualifying self-motivated behavior as altruistic obscures the universality of motivation in producing all behavior, generous or not. Second, the altruism hierarchy is morally self-negating. Critics of “impure” altruism often seem to chide helpers for acting in human ways—for instance, by doing things that feel good. The ideal, then, seems to entail acting altruistically while not enjoying those actions one bit. To me, this is no ideal at all. It’s profound and downright beautiful to think that our core emotional makeup can be tuned toward others, causing us to feel good when we do. Color me selfish, but I’d take that impure altruism over an de-enervated, floating ideal any day.
BY JAMIL ZAKI Assistant professor of psychology, Stanford University
Human beings are the unequivocal world champions of niceness. We act kindly not only toward people who belong to our own social groups or can reciprocate our generosity but also toward strangers thousands of miles away who will never know we helped them. All around the world, people sacrifice their resources, well-being, and even their lives in the service of others. For behavioral scientists, the great and terrible thing about altruism—behavior that helps others at a cost to the helper—is its inherent contradictions. Prosocial behaviors appear to contradict economic and evolutionary axioms about how humans should behave: selfishly, nasty and brutish, red in tooth and claw, or whichever catchphrase you prefer. After all, how could organisms that sacrifice for others survive, and why would nature endow us with such self-defeating tendencies? In recent decades, researchers have largely solved this problem, offering reasons that perfectly self-oriented organisms might behave altruistically. Solving the “altruism paradox” becomes trivial when individuals help family members (thus advancing helpers’ genes) or others who can reciprocate (increasing helpers’ chances of future gains) or others in public (enhancing helpers’ reputations). We see these motives at work all around us—in parenting, favors for bosses, opera patrons donating just enough to get their names on the donor plaque in the lobby. More recently, my colleagues and I, as well as other neuroscientists, uncovered another “selfish” motive for altruism: Helping others simply feels good. It engages brain structures associated with reward and motivation, like those that come online when you see a beautiful face, win money, or eat chocolate. Further, this “reward-related” brain activity not only accompanies giving but also predicts people’s willingness to give, suggesting a tight link between pleasure and generosity. This doesn’t mean that altruism is the psychological equivalent of Ben and Jerry’s, but it does provide converging evidence for UC San Diego economist James Andreoni’s idea that generosity produces a hedonic “warm glow.” One common response I receive when presenting this work has grown increasingly bothersome. Often an audience member will claim that if people experience helping as rewarding, then their actions aren’t “really” altruistic at all. The claim, as I understand it, traces back to the Kantian notion—embedded in the “cost to the helper” part of altruism’s definition—that virtuous action is motivated by principle alone, and that benefiting from that action, whether by material gain or psychological pleasure, disqualifies it as virtuous. Often this contention devolves into long, animated, and (to my mind) useless attempts to find space for true altruism amid an avalanche of ulterior motives. This altruism hierarchy—with a near-mystical “true” altruism residing somewhere in the distance and our sullied attempts at it crowding out real life—is widespread. It also plays a role in matters of judgment. A recent study by George Newman and Daylian Cain of the Yale School of Management demonstrates that people judge people as less moral when they act altruistically and gain in the process than when they gain from clearly nonaltruistic behavior.m In essence, people view “tainted altruism” as worse than no altruism at all. The altruism hierarchy should be retired. I believe that people often help others absent the goal of any personal gain. The social psychologist Dan Batson, philosopher Philip Kitcher, and others have done the philosophical and empirical work of distinguishing other-oriented and self-oriented motives for prosociality. But I also believe that the reservation of terms such as “pure” or “real” for actions bereft of any personal gain is less than useful—for two reasons, both of which connect to the broader idea of self-negation.First, the altruism hierarchy is logically self-negating. Attempts to identify true altruism often boil down to redacting motivation from behavior altogether. The story goes that in order to be pure, helping others must dissociate from personal desire (to look good, feel rewarded, etc.). But it’s logically fallacious to think of any human behavior as amotivated. De facto, when people engage in actions, it’s because they want to. This could represent an overt desire to gain personally, but it could also stem from previous learning (for instance, that helping others in the past has felt good or provided personal gain) that translates into an intuitive prosocial preference. Disqualifying self-motivated behavior as altruistic obscures the universality of motivation in producing all behavior, generous or not. Second, the altruism hierarchy is morally self-negating. Critics of “impure” altruism often seem to chide helpers for acting in human ways—for instance, by doing things that feel good. The ideal, then, seems to entail acting altruistically while not enjoying those actions one bit. To me, this is no ideal at all. It’s profound and downright beautiful to think that our core emotional makeup can be tuned toward others, causing us to feel good when we do. Color me selfish, but I’d take that impure altruism over an de-enervated, floating ideal any day.
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