The Fear Factor Page 12
But who are these anti-psychopaths? Almost no attempts have been made to find them or study them systematically—until now.
The idea to find and study anti-psychopaths may originally have been sparked by, of all things, a paper on face recognition published by some of my former colleagues at Harvard right around the time I began working at Georgetown. Recognizing a person’s identity from their face is an important and astonishingly complex feat—one we may fail to realize is astonishingly complex because we are so incredibly good at it, better even than the best computers to this day. (The face-sorting algorithms in Google Photos still can’t quite keep my children’s faces straight.)
A half normal curve. Abigail Marsh.
At least, most people are incredibly good at it. For over 100 years, rare cases have been documented in which a stroke or head injury has caused a person to suddenly develop prosopagnosia, or “face blindness,” which all but eliminates the ability to recognize individual faces. Affected individuals no longer recognize the faces of close friends or family members; some even fail to recognize their own face in a mirror. Much more recently, it has been determined that not only can prosopagnosia emerge in the absence of any injury, but it’s not even rare: as many as one in forty people may have developmental prosopagnosia, meaning that they have been effectively face-blind their whole lives. Their numbers include the primatologist Jane Goodall and the late neuropsychologist Oliver Sacks. People with this condition represent the very low end of the continuum of face recognition abilities, which are quite variable; about 60 percent of this variation reflects genetic causes.
If prosopagnosia is starting to sound parallel to psychopathy in some ways—a developmental disorder that is highly heritable and results in significant impairments in roughly 1 to 2 percent of the population and milder impairments in a big chunk of the rest of the population—you’re having the same thoughts I did.
But a recent discovery about face processing makes these parallels even more striking: it turns out that people with unusual abilities populate both ends of the face recognition continuum. Those people with developmental prosopagnosia who populate the low end are counterbalanced by a group of super face recognizers on the high end—individuals who are extraordinarily good at remembering and recognizing faces. Super face recognizers might smile and greet a woman passing by on the street who happened to be their waitress five years earlier in a restaurant in a different city. Or they might instantly recognize a middle-aged former schoolmate they haven’t seen since elementary school thirty years prior. Super face recognizers’ abilities are so astounding that they can come off as freakish or creepy. One super recognizer the Harvard research team studied told them, “I do have to pretend that I don’t remember [people], however, because it seems like I stalk them, or that they mean more to me than they do, when I recall that we saw each other once walking on campus four years ago in front of the quad!”
We know that inherited variation contributes to extremes in many basic human traits, like intelligence and height. If inherited variation can also contribute to extremes in complex social skills like the ability to recognize faces, resulting in both those with profound impairments and those with extraordinary talents, it is not so difficult to imagine similar patterns emerging for personality traits like caring and compassion as well. In which case, the psychopathic individuals who populate the very low end of the “caring continuum” should be balanced out by another small population of individuals at the very high end of the continuum who are unusually compassionate. Whereas psychopaths are unusually inclined to harm others to benefit themselves, this opposite population may be unusually inclined to risk harm to themselves to benefit others.
Call them the extraordinary altruists.
The world is absolutely bursting with people who have committed moving acts of altruism. They volunteer to help needy animals or children or the mentally ill. They donate money to strangers in faraway cities or countries. They open up their veins to give their blood to the sick or injured. They remove garments from their own bodies to clothe impoverished people in their communities—sometimes in real time. One 2015 online video showed a woman pulling off her own shoes and socks and giving them to a homeless woman whose calloused feet were bare; in another, a young man on the New York subway pulled off his own shirt and hat and carefully helped a shivering and shirtless homeless man into them. Both of these altruists were unaware that they were being filmed at the time. Although such acts are lovely and heartwarming, I would still describe them as everyday altruism rather than extraordinary altruism, for the simple reason that acts of this kind are so wonderfully ordinary.
The generally accepted definition of altruism is “a voluntary behavior aimed at benefiting the welfare of another person.” Donations to charity, volunteering, donating blood, and helping a stranger all neatly meet this definition, and all these behaviors are squarely in the big central bulge of the compassion curve because they are all (happily) quite common. How common? The 2016 World Giving Index estimates that, in a given month, 2.4 billion people in the world—over half of all the people they surveyed—give some sort of help to a needy stranger. In addition, 1.5 billion donate money to a charity and over 1 billion people volunteer their time. That is a truly staggering amount of help offered to strangers by ordinary people around the globe—every month. The United States is, proportionally, among the most giving countries on the planet, ranking number two out of the 140 countries polled. Seventy-three percent of Americans reported that they had helped a stranger in the past month, 46 percent had volunteered their time, and 63 percent had donated money to charity. The amount of money that Americans give to others in a given year is enormous—in 2015 it was $373 billion, at that point an all-time high. The majority of that money ($265 billion) was given by individuals rather than foundations or corporations, and most of it went to secular causes like health and education. The United States’ closest competitors in terms of generosity are Myanmar, which is routinely ranked number one on the World Giving Index, as well as Australia, New Zealand, and Sri Lanka, which rounded out the 2016 World Giving Index slots for numbers three through five.
How common are other kinds of ordinary altruism, like blood donations? The World Giving Index doesn’t measure blood donations, but the World Health Organization does. The WHO records roughly 108 million blood donations per year around the world. That number includes, according to the American Red Cross, 14 million units of blood collected annually in the United States, which are donated by some 7 million Americans. Because fewer than four in ten Americans are eligible to donate blood, this means that every year nearly one-quarter of all eligible Americans donate blood. This steady stream of donated blood has been given away completely for free since 1974, when the United States moved to an all-volunteer blood supply. In some ways, blood donations are a victim of their own ubiquity. How common they are makes it easy to stop appreciating the generosity of all the millions of people who permit their own blood to be siphoned out of them by strangers so it can be carted away to a blood bank, then injected into still other strangers.
But the risks and discomforts associated with giving blood away to strangers are very minor, which helps to explain why so many people give. The same cannot be said for the donation of other body products, like bone marrow or peripheral stem cells. I’m familiar with the process of stem cell donation, as my mother went through it over a decade ago to save the life of her sister, who was deathly ill from otherwise untreatable lymphoma (and who is, happily, alive and well today). For blood cancer patients like my aunt, such donations often represent the only available cure.
Stem cell and marrow donations involve considerably more time, effort, and discomfort than donating blood. Either type of donation is preceded by hours of medical testing and screening. In addition, for several days leading up to the donation, donors must inject themselves with a medication called filgrastim, which increases the body’s production of the life-saving cells but can also cau
se bone and muscle pain. Finally, peripheral stem cells are harvested from the bloodstream via an hours-long extraction process during which the donor’s entire blood supply is siphoned out through a needle in one arm, run through a filter, and returned to their body through a needle in the other arm. So donating stem cells is not exactly a fun process, although it’s less intrusive than donating bone marrow, a surgical procedure during which marrow is extracted directly from the bones with a needle. Getting back to normal after either procedure takes donors anywhere from a few days to a month or more. But despite all this—despite the effort and inconvenience and discomfort and the fact that they cannot receive any payment at all—an enormous number of people have donated marrow or peripheral stem cells to save the lives of total strangers. Some 10 million people are registered as potential donors in the National Bone Marrow Registry, and about 5,000 of them donate each year.
Donating marrow or stem cells to a stranger begins to strain the limits of what can reasonably be termed “everyday altruism.” That said, bone marrow and peripheral stem cells grow back. Healthy bodies produce them constantly. Removing them is very low-risk and causes only temporary discomfort. For this reason, although donating marrow or stem cells to a stranger is a wonderful and admirable thing to do, I still would not term it truly extraordinary altruism.
Truly extraordinary altruism must not only meet all the usual benchmarks of altruism—a voluntary behavior aimed at benefiting someone other than the self—but it should go beyond ordinary altruism in three ways. First, the beneficiary should be someone unrelated and unknown to the altruist at the time they decided to act. Second, the act must present a significant risk or cost to the altruist. Third, the behavior should be non-normative—something people are not expected or taught to do. Not only does an act that satisfies all of these stipulations impress us as morally exceptional, but it becomes very difficult—impossible, arguably—to attribute the cause of the act to anything but genuinely altruistic motivation, because no amount of fiddling with the ledger could make the benefits to the altruist exceed the costs.
This is important to establish for two reasons. First, truly extraordinary altruism, a behavior that lies at the far end of the caring continuum, is most likely to represent a true mirror image of psychopathy, which lies at the other end. An extraordinary altruist is the most likely to genuinely show us what an anti-psychopath might look like. Exploring extraordinary altruism is also important because a sizable subset of the population is resistant to the possibility of truly altruistic motivation. And I have learned that even people who are receptive to the idea of altruism in the abstract often suspect that particular instances of apparent altruism are actually driven by selfish motives. To have any hope of identifying the neural underpinnings of the human capacity for altruism, it is important to first find examples of it that we can generally agree are driven by genuinely altruistic motivation rather than some other more self-serving cause.
What makes things tricky is that most human behavior is multiply motivated—driven by many forces operating on many levels, both conscious and unconscious, and many of these forces are indeed self-serving. Take an example of ordinary altruistic behavior from my own recent past: I invited my younger brother to live in my basement for a month while he looked for a new home for his family. At a behavioral level, this was surely altruistic: it was a voluntary offer on my part that entailed some (small) costs to myself, and the offer was aimed at benefiting my brother’s welfare—saving him some money, keeping him fed, making sure he was comfortable. But a skeptic could ask, “Was it really altruistic? Was the behavior really primarily motivated by your desire to help him?”
The answer isn’t as easy as me retorting, “Of course it was! I’m the one inside my own brain, and I know the reason I helped my brother, and it was because I wanted to improve his welfare.”
This response assumes that I can know the reasons for my own decisions and behavior. But this assumption is baseless, in part because the “me” that I am aware of isn’t really inhabiting my entire brain. The conscious mind is aware of only a tiny fraction of the processes going on inside the whole brain. What is your pituitary up to right now? How about your brain stem? Are you aware of them? Can you control them? Do you know why they are doing what they’re doing? No. They are more or less cut off from your conscious mind, as are many other neural processes. As a result, although people are reasonably good at correctly reporting on things that they can observe directly, like their own behavior, they are only so-so at reporting internal states like how they are feeling, and they often have no idea why they are feeling or acting as they are—and can be easily misled.
There are countless demonstrations of this in the psychology literature. One I like comes from one of Daniel Batson’s studies of altruism in which he administered a pill called Millentana to his participants at the outset of the study. As he gave them the pill he told some of the participants that Millentana was a drug that would make them feel very warm and sensitive. Others he told that it would make them feel uneasy and uncomfortable. Both explanations were pure fiction—Millentana was actually cornstarch, a psychologically inert placebo.
After swallowing the Millentana and a fictitious explanation of its effects, participants watched a stranger receiving painful shocks. After the first few, some participants were given the option to either receive the remainder of the shocks in her place or leave the study early (with the awareness that the stranger would keep receiving shocks after they departed). Batson found that 83 percent of those who believed that Millentana was making them feel warm and sensitive volunteered to take the shocks for the stranger whereas only 33 percent of the uneasy and distressed participants did. What produced this massive difference in behavior? A little trick that duped the participants into believing that a pellet of cornstarch was fiddling with their emotional states and massively changing their tendency to act altruistically. There is no record of Batson asking the “warm and sensitive” participants why they felt and acted more than twice as altruistic as the “uneasy” participants, but they presumably would have chalked it up to the drug, which Batson knew (as do we) actually had no effect. Batson’s experiment was a stark demonstration of how easily feelings, motivations, and behaviors can be shaped by forces outside of people’s awareness.
Two forces that biologists have convincingly shown to be drivers of everyday altruistic behavior—and that could well have played an unconscious role in motivating my offer to help my brother—are inclusive fitness, which biases organisms to help genetic relatives, and reciprocal altruism, which biases organisms to help those they interact with frequently, related or not. Both of these forces are ultimately self-serving, although the behaviors they promote are no less beneficial for others. Inclusive fitness drives altruism toward relatives across many species and promotes successful propagation of the altruist’s own genes. The thinking is that by helping my brother, who shares about 50 percent of my genes, I’m helping my own genetic legacy in some small way. Any help I give him improves his fitness and thus his likelihood of passing along his own genes—and by extension mine. It’s a convincing explanation for why the preponderance of costly helping behavior across species, from ants to birds to people, benefits genetic relatives. This drive to help genetic relatives occurs somewhere deep down in the nervous system via mechanisms that we share with monkeys and birds and ants, and may not require our conscious awareness. So I can’t possibly know to what extent this phenomenon affected my offer to temporarily house my brother—although I would readily admit that I would have been unlikely to make a similar offer to, say, a fourth cousin.
“Aha!” you might say, “but we help family not just because we are closely related to them genetically, but because we are emotionally close to them.” This is true, and this is where reciprocal altruism comes in. We offer most of our altruistic helping to people with whom we have long-standing close relationships or with whom we share membership in an important social group, whether
it be a family, a neighborhood, a workplace, or a group of friends. The rules of reciprocal altruism are simple: help those who have helped you in the past or who are likely to help you in the future. I bring you some coffee today, you spot me money for lunch tomorrow. I help raise your barn today, you scare a thief away from my cattle tomorrow. I help you escape danger today, and maybe you’ll help me out of a pinch tomorrow or at some other future point. When everyone follows the rules of reciprocal altruism, which members of social species largely do, everyone prospers. It’s a game with very good long-term odds. The whole setup only works, though, when applied to those with whom you expect to keep interacting and who can therefore be reasonably expected to reciprocate. When people interact with strangers they have no expectation of ever seeing again, altruism, especially costly altruism, tends to plummet.
Given this, it’s amazing in some ways that we are still as nice as we are to strangers—giving them directions and making change and holding doors open and giving them donations of money and blood. Neither inclusive fitness nor reciprocity can explain such behaviors. Often, these various forms of low-cost helping may indeed be driven primarily by a selfless desire to help others, although still other forces can be at play as well. For one, because these kinds of behavior satisfy established social norms, we often engage in them merely from habit or by default and, as a bonus, get to feel a sense of satisfaction of having lived up to cultural ideals (whereas we might feel shame if we failed to do so). And sometimes these low-cost behaviors personally benefit the altruist in ways that go beyond future reciprocity. I benefited, for example, from helping my brother. He is fun and funny and interesting, and I loved getting to spend extra time with him while he was staying with me. Likewise, charitable donations can result in tax write-offs, and gallantly holding open doors and volunteering for charities can yield valuable boosts to social reputation. Any self-serving benefits may be small for a given instance of these forms of altruism, but because the costs are also low, the benefits still outweigh them. Thus, although all of these kinds of low-cost altruistic behaviors are wonderful—and often at least partly motivated by altruism—it’s nearly impossible to say for sure what is driving any single instance of donating or direction-giving or change-making or door-holding or basement-letting because there are so many possibilities, and because the various reasons can operate in tandem—a single instance of giving can simultaneously reflect kin selection, expectations of reciprocity, social norms, and a genuine desire to help.