Understanding what motivates people to care for others reveals that human nature is not simply selfish. An important source of insight involves studying individuals who exhibit extreme altruism, such as organ donors. Examining psychopathic behaviors also offers a counterpoint. Researching these questions is difficult within a laboratory due to ethical constraints in simulating real risk or cost scenarios when helping others. An alternative approach involves analyzing real-world cases of altruism to identify distinctive factors that encourage caring more for others.
For the last 20 years or so, I've been trying to understand what makes people care about other people. There's a very pervasive belief that human nature is fundamentally selfish, but I know for a fact that that can't be true in part because my life was saved by a stranger a long time ago when I was 19.
There must be some neural process that allows us to genuinely value other people's welfare. And so to try to understand that better, I have been studying extreme populations of people who care a lot more about others than the average person.
The problem is that kind of question is really hard to answer in the confines of a laboratory, right? Because if you're trying to understand when do people help others at some real risk or cost to themselves, it's really hard to create a situation in the laboratory that is ethical and that could actually result in people facing serious risks or costs.
The approach that we take is finding people who have done things in the real world that exemplify altruism and understanding what makes them different.
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