The Fear Factor Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2017 by Abigail Marsh

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  First edition: October 2017

  Published by Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Names: Marsh, Abigail, author.

  Title: The fear factor : how one emotion connects altruists, psychopaths, and everyone in-between / Abigail Marsh.

  Description: First Edition. | New York : Basic Books, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017014787 (print) | LCCN 2017022393 (ebook) ISBN 9781541697195 (hardback) | ISBN 9781541697201 (ebook) |

  Subjects: LCSH: Fear. | Philanthropists—Psychology—Case studies. |

  Psychopaths—Psychology—Case studies. | BISAC: PSYCHOLOGY / Psychopathology / General. | SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Neuroscience.

  Classification: LCC BF575.F2 (ebook) | LCC BF575.F2 M374 2017 (print) | DDC 152.4/6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014787

  ISBNs: 978-1-54169-719-5 (hardcover); 978-1-54169-720-1 (e-book)

  E3-20170829-JV-NF

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1The Rescue

  2Heroes and Antiheroes

  3The Psychopathic Brain

  4The Other Side of the Curve

  5What Makes an Altruist?

  6The Milk of Human Kindness

  7Can We Be Better?

  8Putting Altruism into Action

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Notes

  Index

  To the man whose astonishing bravery and compassion inspired this book, and to all the other altruists whose actions have inspired those whose lives they have touched.

  PROLOGUE

  It is extremely doubtful whether the offspring of the more sympathetic and benevolent parents, or of those which were the most faithful to their comrades, would be reared in greater number than the children of selfish or treacherous parents of the same tribe. He who was ready to sacrifice his life, as many a savage has been, rather than betray his comrades, would often leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature.

  —CHARLES DARWIN, The Descent of Man

  My favorite part is that other people say, “Oh, I could never do that.” Well, that’s bullshit.

  —Altruistic kidney donor HAROLD MINTZ, on donating a kidney

  IN 1934, THE French entomologist Antoine Magnan set forth to write a scholarly text on the flight of insects. He ran into one niggling problem. After running calculations with an engineer named André Saint-Lagué, Magnan concluded that, according to the laws of aerodynamics, insects should not be able to fly at all. With a note of dejection, he wrote: “I applied the laws of air resistance to insects, and I arrived with Mr. St. Lagué at the conclusion that their flight is impossible.”

  And yet insects fly.

  Conspiracy theorists love to use this apparent contradiction (sometimes touted as applying only to bees) to declare physics and biology to be bankrupt pursuits. Some religious devotees proclaim it as evidence of a higher power. But scientists are patient, and time is on their side.

  Upon reading Magnan’s assertion, entomologists did not decide that insect flight must be an illusion, or that it results from supernatural forces. Nor did they conclude that the laws of aerodynamics are hopeless bunk. They knew that reconciliation must be possible, but awaited better methods for measuring the properties of insect flight and calculating the physical dynamics at play.

  Several decades and the invention of high-speed photography later, the puzzle has been solved. Insects, bees included, fly because their wings beat very quickly—bee wings make 230 short, choppy strokes every second—while rotating around their hinge to carve figure-eights in the air. The rotation creates a bug wing–sized vortex that generates enough lift to support a fat bug body. A robotic wing can be programmed to work precisely the same way, conclusively demonstrating that insect flight and the laws of physics are compatible.

  Another apparent contradiction of the laws of nature, one that is arguably even more puzzling than insect flight, is altruism.

  The theory of evolution by natural selection is as rock-solid as scientific laws get. But as Charles Darwin, the father of the theory, calculated some 150 years ago, natural selection seems to dictate that all the altruists should have died out long ago. An individual who sacrifices to help another person will do wonders for the other person’s odds of survival, but not much for his own. Over the course of human history, the saps who sacrificed their own evolutionary fitness for others should have been outcompeted, outnumbered, and eventually completely superseded by their self-serving brethren.

  And yet altruism exists.

  I know this from personal experience. When I was nineteen, an altruistic stranger saved my life, gaining nothing in exchange for the risks he undertook to rescue me. And he was just one of many. Carnegie Hero Fund Medals are awarded every year to dozens of Americans who risk their lives to extraordinary degrees to save the lives of strangers. Over one hundred Americans a year undergo surgery, at no small risk to themselves, to donate a kidney to a stranger, often anonymously. Millions of people around the world donate bone marrow or blood—smaller sacrifices, certainly, but with no less noble a purpose: to help a stranger in need.

  Until recently, there was no clear scientific explanation for actions like these. Since Darwin’s era, biologists have developed models to explain altruistic behavior, but these models focus on altruism aimed at helping close kin or members of one’s own social group. For example, some altruism toward kin can be explained via inclusive fitness. Inclusive fitness dictates that an altruistic behavior can evolve if its beneficiary shares enough genes with the altruist to compensate the altruist for the risk he or she has taken. It explains why colony-dwelling creatures like ground squirrels sound an alarm when a predator approaches. These calls attract the predator’s attention and put the caller at risk, but they also help close relatives in the colony escape danger. Inclusive fitness may also explain why humans prefer to donate organs to close family members instead of strangers or friends. If you donate a kidney to your sister and she goes on to bear your nieces and nephews, they will carry some of your genes into the next generation. You may not personally benefit from your generosity, but your genes will, which makes the risk worthwhile from an evolutionary point of view.

  What about altruism toward distantly related or unrelated others? Some such altruism takes the form of reciprocal altruism, which relies on the expectation that the beneficiary will one day return the favor. For example, vampire bats famously regurgitate blood into the mouths of even unrela
ted colony-mates who cannot find food and are at risk of starving. Their generosity pays off, though. Bats are more likely to receive blood buffets in the future from those with whom they have shared in the past. Humans engage in similar acts of reciprocity all the time, minus the regurgitation. You have probably lent a neighbor sugar or bought your colleagues coffee with the expectation that they will eventually reciprocate. Reciprocal altruism nearly always benefits members of the altruist’s social group, who are more likely to be willing and able to return the favor later than would a passing stranger. This form of altruism is really a form of delayed gratification because ultimately the altruist will personally benefit, but only after some time has passed.

  Both kin-based altruism and cooperation-based altruism are widespread and valuable biological strategies. Life as a social species would probably be impossible without them. Many books about altruism explore these forms of altruism in great detail. But both of these types of altruism are fundamentally selfish, in a sense. Kinbased altruism is directly aimed at benefiting the altruist’s genes, and cooperation-based altruism is directly aimed at benefiting the altruist personally. So both of these models are useless for explaining the kind of altruism exhibited by altruistic kidney donors or Carnegie Heroes or the man who rescued me. These altruists intentionally and voluntarily risk their lives to save, not a relative or a friend, but an anonymous stranger. And they do it with no possible commensurate payoff to themselves, either genetically or personally. Indeed, they often pay dearly for their sacrifices. What could possibly explain their actions?

  As in the case of insect flight, the seeming contradiction between altruism and the known laws of science often leads people to seek other explanations. Some declare all altruism an illusion. No matter how altruistic an action appears to be, no matter how great the risk and how small any possible payoff, perhaps it is really self-interest in disguise. Perhaps heroic rescuers are just looking for a rush and kidney donors are seeking public adulation. Others cite supernatural forces, calling heroic rescuers “guardian angels,” or altruistic kidney donors “saints.” Metaphorical or not, these terms suggest that whatever motivates these altruists cannot be explained by science. But scientists are patient, and time is on their side.

  An avalanche of new technologies for studying human psychology and behavior have emerged in recent decades, including new methods for measuring and manipulating activity inside the brain, acquiring genetic information, and comparing human and animal behaviors. Much of this work has emerged at the intersection of established disciplines, spawning entirely new fields like social neuroscience and cognitive neurogenetics. Just as high-speed photography and robotics yielded new answers about insect flight, so has this profusion of technologies yielded new answers about human altruism.

  My own rescue inspired me to take advantage of these new approaches to understand the origins of altruism. I was a college student at the time, and shortly thereafter I turned my academic focus to the study of psychology. I first conducted laboratory-based research as an undergraduate at Dartmouth College and later as a doctoral student at Harvard University. While working on my dissertation at Harvard, I made a serendipitous discovery. Efforts to find markers of highly altruistic people in the laboratory had until that point mostly failed. But I discovered that altruism is robustly related to how attuned people are to others’ fear. People who can accurately label photos of frightened faces are also the people who donate the most money to a stranger under controlled laboratory conditions, or volunteer the most time to help them. The ability to label others’ fear predicts altruism better than gender, mood, or how compassionate study participants claim to be, and this relationship holds up in study after study. But the question persisted: why?

  Answers began to emerge as I continued my research in the laboratory of Dr. James Blair at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). I joined the Bethesda, Maryland, lab just as it was embarking on the first-ever series of brain imaging studies to probe what makes psychopathic adolescents tick. This required using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of teenagers at risk of becoming psychopaths. The results revealed that these teenagers’ brains were marked by dysfunction in a structure called the amygdala, which is buried deep in the brain’s interior and is responsible for essential social and emotional functions. In these teenagers who showed little empathy or compassion for others, the amygdala was underresponsive to images of others’ fear. Moreover, this pattern of dysfunction seemed to prevent the teenagers from identifying fearful expressions. If amygdala dysfunction robs people of both empathy and the ability to recognize fear, could amygdala-based sensitivity to others’ fear be a critical ingredient for altruism—including acts of extraordinary altruism like the one that saved my life?

  An image of the amygdala from one of our brain imaging studies.

  Abigail Marsh and Katherine O’Connell.

  Finding an answer would require locating real altruists and scanning their brains, which had never been previously attempted. Upon completing my postdoctoral research fellowship at NIMH, I began a professorship at Georgetown University, whereupon my research group set about recruiting nineteen altruistic kidney donors who had donated a kidney to a stranger. Some of them had responded to flyers posted by strangers seeking kidneys, and others had called a local transplant center and offered to give a kidney anonymously to anyone who needed it, no questions asked. None received payment in exchange for the inconvenience, pain, and small risk of serious injury or death that the surgery entailed. They weren’t even compensated for the days of work they missed or their travel expenses. On the surface, these extraordinary altruists had little in common—they were men and women of varying ages, religious backgrounds, and political persuasions who came from all over America and told very different stories about what drove them to donate. But our research demonstrated that they did share something in common: an unusually strong amygdala response to pictures of other people’s fear, as well as an enhanced ability to recognize it.

  The Fear Factor delves deep inside the human brain to explore why sensitivity to others’ fear is such a powerful marker for altruism, on the one hand, and for psychopathy, on the other. Findings from my own research, coupled with emerging knowledge from brain imaging and genetic studies, have provided new insights into the origins of empathy, psychopathy, and altruism. This book considers the question of how our species came to be endowed with the capacity to care by tracing altruism in modern humans back to the emergence of Earth’s first mammals, who developed a desire to nurture and protect their offspring rather than let them fend for themselves. This desire springs in part from a chemical called oxytocin. Oxytocin is expressed strongly in the amygdala and may be able to convert the desire to avoid the distress of others into the desire to ameliorate it. New evidence suggests that psychopathy may result from breakdowns in the brain processes that evolved to enable parenting.

  With this in mind, my NIMH colleagues and I developed a protocol to administer oxytocin intranasally to a sample of typical human research participants who came to the sprawling clinical center of the NIH. We evaluated how administering oxytocin affected the deep-seated social processes that underlie the capacity for altruism, like sensitivity to others’ emotions and responses to the faces of infants. To put our findings in context, I tracked down stories of modern mammals from around the globe, from lions to golden retrievers, who have engaged in acts of extraordinary parenting. Understanding how fearsome carnivores like lions and dogs could be moved to nurture and protect creatures, like antelopes and squirrels, which they would normally hunt and kill, may hold the key to understanding equally unlikely acts of altruism in humans—and how to foster them. The Fear Factor considers whether, if the lion can lie down with the antelope (if not the lamb), we humans can learn to become more altruistic toward one another as well—and whether we should.

  1

  THE RESCUE

  OVER BREAKFAST THE morning after the rescue my m
om could tell just by looking at me that something had happened. I left it at, “I hit a dog on the freeway.” Which was true. But the rest, the part I couldn’t bring myself to tell her for fear she might lose her mind from retroactive panic, is the real start of my story.

  I was driving home to Tacoma, Washington, after spending the evening with a childhood friend in Seattle. It was a clear summer night around midnight, traffic was light, and I was sober. All that was the fortunate part. Less fortunate was the car I was driving—my mom’s SUV of a vintage that is infamous for being unstable during sharp turns. Normally Interstate 5 doesn’t require any sharp turns as it wends its way from Seattle toward downtown Tacoma. The eight-lane freeway curves only slightly as it rises up over the Puyallup River, the peeling blue mass of the Tacoma Dome looming ahead of the southbound drivers.

  I don’t know where the dog came from. The overpass traverses an industrial area with no homes that a dog could have escaped from, and it has no shoulders that a dog could run along. It’s hard to imagine a less likely place to run into a dog. But run into it I did. Or rather, I ran over it. I tried to avoid it, jerking the steering wheel as soon as I saw the tiny orangeish mass streaking across the road at a speed only an absolutely terrified dog could muster. Jerking the steering wheel to avoid an animal is, of course, the wrong response. Just mow it down is what all the experts say. But my first instinct was to avoid the dog, and I had no time to override that instinct. I love dogs. I wanted a dog so badly when I was in grade school that I daydreamed about being blind so that I could get a guide dog. Recalling the feel of my front wheel rising slightly as it rolled over that poor creature still makes me shudder.

  What came next was worse. The combination of the car turning sharply and then tilting as it rolled over the dog destabilized the SUV and sent it into a fishtail. It veered sickeningly leftward across two lanes, then swooped back across them to the right as I fought for control of the wheel. But by the third turn the pull of the wheel had become too strong and I lost control completely. The car started to spin. A sickening succession of images passed before me as the car carved circles across the freeway: guardrail… headlights… guardrail… taillights… guardrail… and… headlights. Then, still facing the headlights of the oncoming cars, it slid to a stop.