The Fear Factor Read online

  Analyses of cultural values across nations reliably find wealth to be a positive predictor of individualism, with wealthy countries like the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands having some of the highest individualism scores and less wealthy countries like Guatemala, Ecuador, Indonesia, and Pakistan having some of the lowest. And individualist values tend to increase with growing prosperity within a given culture. For example, one recent study found that over the last 200 years, indicators of individualism increased in tandem with wealth in both the United States and the United Kingdom. And the recent period of incredible economic growth in China, historically one of the world’s most collectivist nations, has also coincided with a growing emphasis on individualism there. This effect may be bidirectional, such that wealth and individualism are mutually reinforcing. Prosperity has reliably predicted subsequent increases in individualism over the last 150 years of cultural changes in the United States, but individualist values may also promote economic growth.

  It can be tempting to think of individualism as a proxy for selfishness and collectivism as a proxy for generosity, but this is not exactly true. Collectivist cultures do very much value social ties, generosity, and cooperation—but primarily toward members of their own communities. In China, for example, traditional Confucian teachings emphasize the value of altruism, but with a focus on altruism that benefits close family members and friends. And in Fiji, which is also a highly collectivist society, people tend to be extremely generous toward others in their village. But according to the behavioral scientist Joseph Heinrich, when “Fijians do games that involve giving to distant poor people, they seem almost baffled as to why anyone would send money to someone they don’t know far away.” An emphasis on group bonds requires that members of collectivist cultures draw clear distinctions between the group members whose welfare, goals, and identities are deeply interdependent and everyone else. And relatively little value is placed on the welfare of everyone else. This is an unfortunate and perhaps inevitable* downside of maintaining strong group bonds and identities. Collectivism is associated with low levels of what is called relational mobility, meaning that relationship networks in collectivist societies are not only strong and interdependent but also stable across time. A collectivist can assume that their closest relationships will remain their closest relationships for years or decades into the future. There are clear upsides to such stability, but one downside is the way it affects people’s attitudes toward anyone new. In individualist cultures, higher relational mobility means that anyone unfamiliar could “one day become a friend,” as cultural psychologist Yulia Chentsova-Dutton, a colleague of mine at Georgetown, put it to me. Her words struck me as a beautiful description of my initial interactions with many of the altruists I’ve met. They seem to approach us right from the start not as strangers but as potential friends. This is an approach that is less common among collectivist cultures, where it is more likely to be assumed that a stranger will stay a stranger.

  Decades of social psychology research also make it exceedingly clear that dividing people into clearly defined groups is a great way to get them to treat members of other groups worse. This is true even if the groups are nonsensical—in what are called minimal group paradigms, people can be instantly induced to downgrade the value of a stranger’s welfare when merely told that the stranger is a member of an arbitrarily created “Blue” group instead of the subject’s own “Green” group. And when the wider culture paints members of an outgroup as actively threatening or contemptible—think of how Nazi-era Germans depicted the Jews, or how many modern nations view Muslim refugees—compassion toward members of those groups will be further suppressed. In such cases, the fear of others drowns out any inclination to fear for those others’ welfare. This phenomenon can be exacerbated by a negativity bias–driven media, which is a powerful purveyor of cultural norms and helps determine who is viewed as a threat. Again, however, poor treatment of outgroup members is not a reflection of anyone’s capacity for compassion. If anything, compassion for our loved ones can sensitize us to anyone we view as a threat to them—much as the lioness chased away her fellow lions when they encroached on her baboon “cub,” or as Mimi the chihuahua became hostile toward her owner once she had “pups” to protect.

  These psychological phenomena may help to explain why, although members of individualist cultures are not more altruistic overall, they do tend to be more altruistic, on average, toward strangers. Individualist cultures tend to rank higher on the World Giving Index, which, again, measures charitable donations, volunteering for social organizations, and providing everyday help—for strangers. The top of this index is reliably dominated by the world’s most individualist nations, including Australia, Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These countries are also vastly more likely to donate blood, bone marrow, and organs—at least deceased organs—to strangers. (Living organ donations to strangers are still too rare to meaningfully compare across cultures, but the vast majority of deceased organ donations are performed in individualist nations in Europe and North America.)

  Some of these differences clearly reflect wealthy nations’ infrastructure and outreach advantages—it’s hard to run a blood bank or a transplant center without a reliable power supply or funds to pay staff or buy supplies—but cultural views also seem to play a role. In studies of blood donations conducted in relatively collectivist countries in Africa and Asia, respondents often say that they would donate blood to a family member, but much smaller fractions would consider donating to a stranger. This may contribute to the persistent problem in many developing nations of low blood donation rates (averaging 0.4 percent—too low to meet a nation’s basic blood requirements) and near-total reliance on donations from relatives or for pay. Even within an individualist nation like the United States, members of more individualist subcultures are more likely to volunteer to help strangers or donate organs to them than members of more collectivist subcultures.

  Again, none of these broad cultural patterns are anywhere near absolute—they represent average differences across groups that help us understand the cultural forces that cause widespread changes in compassion and altruism. They cannot predict how altruistic any given person will be. Plenty of wealthy people in individualist cultures remain impervious to the needs of strangers, and members of poor or collectivist cultures can be overwhelmingly generous. Exceptions to the overall patterns can result from, among other things, specific religious or cultural views that promote generosity toward strangers. For example, Myanmar is a nation that is neither wealthy nor individualist, but it reliably ranks number one on the World Giving Index, thanks in part to the widespread practice there of Theravada Buddhism, which emphasizes the importance of giving.

  Myanmar is also notable for one additional feature that may not be incidental to altruism: it has a relatively high literacy rate (over 90 percent). Literacy is yet another correlate of increased prosperity that may heighten genuine concern for the welfare of distant others.

  The current age of widespread literacy was initiated by the invention of the printing press at the dawn of the Renaissance. This invention represented a new era for many reasons, one of which was, of course, that the mass production of books allowed knowledge to be disseminated more easily and cheaply. But that wasn’t all. Books are not merely knowledge containment units—they are not manuals. No one would read them if they were (see: manuals). Instead, books are windows into the minds of the people who wrote them and the people who are written about. Fiction, in particular, represents what the psychologist Keith Oatley calls “the mind’s flight simulator”—a vehicle for exploring the rich mental and emotional landscapes of people we have never met.

  In making the experiences and emotions of people from vastly different and distant cultures both emotionally transporting and relatable, fiction enables us to become emotionally invested in the characters we encounter, to care about their plights an
d their fates. Although any kind of fictional media—including movies, television, or radio—could theoretically achieve this effect, written fiction may be uniquely powerful for breaking down barriers between cultures and groups. This is in part because a person represented through written words is completely abstracted and uncontaminated by the foreign accents, styles of dress, and mannerisms that can mark physically embodied people as outgroup members whose welfare might be devalued during face-to-face interactions. In allowing readers to perceive the world from inside a disembodied stranger’s head, fiction provides people across cultures with a visceral appreciation for the universality of their own emotions and experiences, thereby lowering barriers to compassion.

  Steven Pinker has made a strong argument that the emergence of literacy played a major role in historical declines in violence, probably by directly strengthening people’s ability to care for distant others. Supporting this possibility, laboratory studies show that exposure to the written word can increase empathy and compassion for strangers. In one study conducted by Daniel Batson, some subjects read a brief note in which a fictitious stranger, whom subjects never personally saw or met, described her distress over a recent breakup: “I’ve been kind of upset. It’s all I think about. My friends all tell me that I’ll meet other guys and all I need is for something good to happen to cheer me up. I guess they’re right, but so far that hasn’t happened.” Subjects who read these words and then played a single-trial Prisoner’s Dilemma game with the stranger who wrote them showed impressive increases in generosity toward her—even though she had just defected against them! Twenty-eight percent of the subjects who read the note chose to cooperate, despite defection in this scenario being the objectively optimal response. Compare this with the number who cooperated with her without having read her written correspondence: 0 percent. The stranger’s words made her human—and a vulnerable, distressed human at that.

  More recent research has also shown that the empathic effects of reading generalize past the specific individuals depicted in the text. People who read more fiction (but not nonfiction) are better at identifying complex and subtle emotions in others’ faces. And when subjects in one study were experimentally assigned to read a work of literary fiction, they reported increased empathic concern for others even long after they had closed the book.

  It seems, then, that a potent combination of steady cultural changes over the last several hundred years of human history may be responsible for the decreasing violence and increasing altruism toward strangers during that period. The rise of states suppressed violence and promoted trade, leading to increasing standards of living and abundance of resources. Growing abundance has gradually reduced the extent to which people must rely on strong, closed social groups for survival and permits a loosening of the severe distinctions between social group members and outsiders. Abundance has also promoted increases in education, particularly literacy, which has further encouraged the sharing of the fruits of growing abundance broadly rather than narrowly: the slopes of the mountain of social discounting are flattening.

  Together, these changes help to reinforce why, although the human capacity for altruism reflects basic biological processes and is highly heritable, cultural forces can also cause altruism to increase. (We already know the same is true for human height, which is also highly heritable and has also been increasing around the world for decades due to cultural factors, a phenomenon known as the Flynn Effect.) The genes that build the brain structures that motivate us to care are not operating in a vacuum. When vast and rapid shifts in altruistic behavior are observed across time or nations, these changes cannot be due to changes in the genome—only to changes in the culture in which that genome is expressed. The structures that our genes build are under the constant influence of cultural forces that influence how much compassion and caring any given person will exhibit—and for whom.

  * Not completely inevitable, fortunately. There is a simple and very effective way of reducing hostility between groups: simple intergroup contact. The more we interact with members of perceived outgroups, the more we tend to like them.

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  PUTTING ALTRUISM INTO ACTION

  A VARIETY OF cultural shifts—prosperity, cultural norms, literacy—represent sea changes that have affected patterns of violence and compassion across large populations over long periods of time. But what about promoting altruism in the shorter term? Are there strategies that can effect meaningful changes at the individual level?

  Again, happily, the answer is yes. One piece of evidence for this actually derives from the cultural data. As cultures become more individualist, it’s not just the kinds of behaviors that people engage in that tend to shift, but also all the motivations that drive these behaviors. And this matters. Collectivist cultures generally value conformity to cultural norms, which makes prescribed norms and obligations important drivers of all behaviors, altruism included. The psychologist Toshio Yamagishi has proposed that this may explain why interpersonal trust actually tends to be lower in collectivist societies—because strong social norms make it difficult or impossible to make determinations about how trustworthy people are from their behavior. In more individualist cultures, by contrast, altruism is more likely to be motivated by individual values and choices.

  There are benefits to both kinds of motivation, but one key benefit of altruism being motivated by personal values like the desire to help others is that this kind of altruism feels really good. An influential series of studies conducted by the psychologists Netta Weinstein and Richard Ryan found that when altruistic behavior is motivated by the altruist’s personal goals and values, it results in higher levels of well-being than altruism driven by external factors. Altruism motivated by genuine compassion results not only in the glow of accomplishment and satisfaction that accompanies reaching any goal, but also in the vicarious joy that altruism promotes when it is motivated by the genuine desire to improve another’s welfare. I have seen how close to the surface this joy remains for many extraordinary altruists, even long after their donations. It’s the one topic that is the most likely to move them—and usually me too—to tears during our interviews. I vividly remember one altruist’s description of a note he received from the mother of the boy who received his kidney. The boy’s mother wrote that the kidney had started working immediately after the surgeons implanted it, and that she had never been so happy to see urine in all of her life. She added that her son was by that point off dialysis completely and had been able, for the first time in his life, to go to the beach. As she wrote, they were planning his first camping trip as well. The altruist’s voice shook as he recalled receiving the letter. He told me that, to that day, “I can read it anytime and I just lose it. I just I lose it.”

  I have asked all of the altruists I’ve worked with if they would donate again, had they another kidney to spare. Every single one has said yes. Several have used the exact phrase: “In a heartbeat!” They aren’t always able to articulate why, exactly, but their sentiments often echo those of one altruist who said that giving away his kidney “just satisfied something very deep within me.” One particularly effusive altruist said, “If I had ten I would donate all ten. I would. It is life-changing when you do it. I cannot explain how, but your whole perception of everything changes.” Another told us, “I know from my own experience there’s a euphoria that accompanies the act of living donation, which is difficult to explain without sounding a little crazy. I can only liken this heightened sense of peace to the bliss many women feel after the birth of a child. It just is.” Their words also remind me of the evident satisfaction felt by Lenny Skutnik, who, in interviews after his rescue, said that he “felt satisfied,” because “I did what I set out to do.”

  Unfortunately, the joy that can accompany altruism is the source of much misunderstanding. I have been asked by more than one curious person if altruistic kidney donors are glad they donated, and if donating is something that has brought them pleasure. When I answer that,
yes, they definitely are, and it does, I sometimes get a response along the lines of: “Aha! Then what they did wasn’t altruistic! It was selfish, because donating made them happier!”

  This is a fallacy, pure and simple. But unfortunately, it’s a pervasive one. It’s so pervasive that some altruists who are surprised by the pleasure their donations have brought them are left doubting their own motivations—despite all the pain and inconvenience, not to mention hundreds or thousands of dollars in financial costs, they have incurred. These doubts reflect a common but fundamental error, which is the confusion of foreseen outcomes with intended outcomes. Any goal-directed action will result in satisfaction or enjoyment when the goal is accomplished, an outcome that can be foreseen in advance. But a foreseen outcome tells us nothing about the action’s motivation. At a psychological level, altruism is defined as acting with the ultimate goal of benefiting another’s welfare, a goal that a wealth of experimental research confirms can indeed motivate both ordinary and extraordinary altruism. Whether altruists are ultimately pleased by the outcome of their actions has no bearing on this criterion.

  If simply achieving pleasure was actually the goal, there are countless ways to do so that involve nowhere near the risk and discomfort of saving a stranger’s life. For examples of such pleasurable activities, just ask a psychopath about how they prefer to spend their leisure time. I promise you that psychopaths, who are actually selfish and interested primarily in their own enjoyment, do not go about achieving it by helping anonymous strangers at significant risk to themselves. Indeed, the primary reason scientists study them is because the opposite is true: they are more likely to harm strangers to benefit themselves. The fact that, for most people, alleviating others’ suffering and bringing them joy can be a source of personal pleasure is, in my view, what distinguishes most of us from psychopaths—it is evidence that we have the capacity for genuine altruism. As the Buddhist monk and neuroscience researcher Matthieu Ricard explains, “The fact that we feel satisfaction upon completing an altruistic action presupposes that we are naturally inclined to favor the other’s happiness. If we were completely indifferent to others’ fates, why would we feel pleasure in taking care of them?”