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  That altruism can bring real pleasure is a wonderful thing. It means that engaging in altruism is reinforcing—the gratification it incurs makes it more likely to be repeated. What this suggests is that, if you want to be more altruistic, just start! Start small if you like. Donate blood. Register to donate bone marrow. Volunteer for a charity whose work you find meaningful. Stop to pick up something a stranger has dropped. Be spontaneous. Don’t spend a lot of time mulling it over or you might end up talking yourself out of it. When you think of an achievable way to help others, one that you find meaningful, go do it. I can almost guarantee that you will be glad you did. Expending resources on helping others almost always improves well-being more than expending the same resources on yourself. And because well-being in turn increases altruism, even small acts of altruism can set into motion a virtuous cycle of giving, much as was the case for Rob Mather, whose initial fund-raising efforts on behalf of one grievously injured girl ultimately spiraled into one of the world’s most powerful anti-malaria foundations.

  The lives of many of the altruistic kidney donors I have worked with seem to have followed a similar trajectory: they disproportionately report having been longtime blood donors, members of the national bone marrow registry, and volunteers for charitable causes. My sense is that the gratification derived from each of these smaller acts of altruism causes some people to work their way up to extraordinary acts of altruism, “like dominoes falling,” as Harold Mintz puts it. For these people, behaving altruistically has become so well learned and deeply ingrained that it has become second nature.

  That the reinforcing nature of altruism can ultimately make it self-sustaining is entirely consistent with the neuroscience literature. For example, an intact maternal care system is necessary only to kick off maternal care in rodents like rats, not to keep it going. Once a mother rat has had the experience of successfully caring for offspring, even blocking all her oxytocin receptors and completely disabling the maternal care system will not affect her well-learned ability to mother. The deep-seated emotional urge to care may be a vital springboard for altruism, but once altruistic behavior has taken root, it can self-perpetuate through sheer force of habit. This may help to explain why the amygdala lesion patient S.M. is not a psychopath. She shares with psychopaths many neurocognitive deficits, including a near-total blindness to other people’s fear. But whereas these deficits are lifelong in psychopaths, S.M.’s deficits were acquired—she had a partially intact amygdala until well into her teenage years. For more than a decade of her early life, she had ample opportunity to develop the habits and rewards of altruistic behavior, which seem to have been sufficiently reinforcing that she remains a kindly and generous person to this day, without any amygdala at all. This fact reinforces the critical point that the amygdala is not by itself the source of care or altruism or compassion. These are complex emergent phenomena that arise from activity in a network of interconnected brain regions. The amygdala is a vitally important node in this network, but it is only one node.

  The importance of practice also helps explain why the techniques that have been empirically demonstrated to increase the capacity for altruism usually boil down to increasing opportunities for practicing it. One recent tantalizing study found that a virtual reality experience that provides people with superhero-like powers to help others may increase prosocial behavior back in the real world (or at least the laboratory). And a twenty-year-old program with demonstrated success in increasing compassionate behaviors in schoolchildren is Roots of Empathy, developed by Mary Gordon. The program, which provides children with the opportunity to practice caring for an infant that their classroom “adopts” for a school year, seems well designed to capitalize on children’s capacities for alloparenting. During the year, children engage in caring behaviors that include recording lullabies or poems for the baby and writing down wishes they have for the baby’s life. Children who complete the program are better able to recognize an infant’s cries as signaling emotional distress and tend to show fewer aggressive behaviors and more everyday helping toward one another as well.

  The most robustly supported way to enhance altruism appears to be via either of two related Buddhist practices called compassion and loving-kindness meditation, both of which are basically compassion boot camp. Meditators practice extending feelings of compassion, love, and generosity normally felt only for close social others to progressively more distant others, including strangers, difficult people, and ultimately all beings without distinction. The idea of experiencing genuine love and compassion for a total stranger can sound far-fetched, but just consider the fact that this kind of love is par for the course for every species of mammal on earth, humans included, in response to their babies, who, having never previously existed, are the ultimate strangers. But nearly everyone can claim the capacity to experience genuine love for such a stranger as part of our birthright. And if that capacity is there to start with, it can be built up and out. Even relatively brief training in compassion and loving-kindness meditation appears to be effective, increasing both feelings of connectedness with strangers and the tendency to behave altruistically toward them. It seems unlikely to be a coincidence that Buddhism is the dominant faith practiced by the most generous country in the world, as well as by Sunyana Graef, the first person ever to donate a kidney to an anonymous stranger, who converted to the faith as a teenager and is now a Buddhist priest. Although it’s the rare major religion that doesn’t advocate developing compassion toward all beings, Buddhism is unusual in having developed structured techniques for actually achieving this goal.

  But meditation is only one of many routes to developing the capacity for altruism and, perhaps as important, the proclivity to use it. Several of the extraordinary altruists I have worked with are Buddhist, but most are not. Lenny Skutnik is not a Buddhist, nor is Cory Booker. Nor, to my knowledge, was the gold-toothed BMW-driving man who rescued me twenty years ago on a freeway overpass in Tacoma. All I know for certain that these people share are the capacity to recognize when another person is in need, the wherewithal to respond, and the proclivity to respond regardless of whether the person in need is someone close to them.

  This suggests that before the opportunity to save someone’s life confronted these people—an opportunity that, in many cases, would come to define their lives—all of them had found a way, metaphorically, to build up the earth around themselves, raising the value of even strangers’ welfare to an elevated plane. The mountains on which they stand are closer to rolling hills, without large distinctions among those who populate them. In other words, all of these altruists had cultivated, wittingly or unwittingly, a sense of humility—a sense of the self as equal to and part of, rather than elevated above, all of the others around them.

  That humility is the final essential ingredient for extraordinary altruism, the ingredient that binds all the others together, helps to explain what I initially found to be a puzzlingly uniform quality in extraordinary altruists: their intense resistance to all efforts to elevate them with accolades and labels like “hero.” Such efforts literally make them cringe. Recall the pained smile on Cory Booker’s face when a reporter asked him how he felt about being called a superhero; it reminds me exactly of how the first altruists we tested looked when some of my students fawned over them. Real heroes are truly humble people. They don’t think of themselves as better or more important than other people, and being treated as though they are tends to make them extremely uncomfortable. Recall what Harold Mintz told us at the outset of our study: “Your study here is going to find out that I’m just the same as you.” The fact that humility is an essential ingredient for altruism helps to explain another curious feature of extraordinary altruists: so many of them are middle-aged or older. Humility, happily, is one of those rare and wonderful qualities that tends to grow stronger and more robust from youth through adulthood and into middle age.

  I started out thinking that this universal, seemingly unshakable humility, this flat-
out resistance to being lionized or thought of as special in any way, was a quirky bug of altruists, but now I think it may be a feature. Humility may be, in the words of Saint Augustine, the quality that “makes men as angels.” It flattens the slopes of narcissism and parochialism and ensures that truly altruistic people don’t think of themselves as angels. If they did, they most likely would not be altruistic! Not only does being put on a pedestal make altruists uncomfortable, but it’s not really accurate or fair to think of altruists as angels, or saints, or superheroes, or supernatural in any way. Although they are clearly more sensitive than average to others’ distress, their capacity for compassion and generosity reflects the same neural mechanisms that lie latent in most of humankind. Indeed, it is in part the fact that altruists recognize that they are not fundamentally different from anyone else that moves them to act.

  Remember this the next time you have an opportunity to help someone else, even if helping comes at some cost to yourself, even if the person in need of help is a stranger.

  Remember what my roadside rescuer did.

  And remember the words of Cory Booker:

  “Just driving in our car, most of us see problems and challenges, and the question is: are you going to be someone who just keeps going?”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is the product of over a decade’s worth of research, and many more years’ worth of reflecting on the question: why and how do humans have the capacity to care for one another? To that end, I first wish to thank the anonymous man who rescued me from a freeway overpass in Tacoma over twenty years ago, who gave me the opportunity and the incentive to work toward answering this question. I have always hoped I might one day get to thank him properly in person; perhaps I may yet.

  I am also eternally grateful for the support and training of my academic mentors, who provided me with the tools and training to work toward answering this question empirically. They include my undergraduate adviser Bob Kleck, who guided me through my first research projects, and who I have always viewed as a model for what a researcher should be—unquenchably curious, open to new ideas (even those of an eager but untrained undergraduate researcher), and able to consider any question from multiple perspectives. I am also grateful to my graduate mentors, the late Nalini Ambady and Daniel Wegner, whom I admired so much and miss to this day. I learned from them many essential components of conducting psychology research, including what it means to be a supportive and encouraging mentor. I thank as well my other graduate advisers, instructors, and collaborators, including Dan Gilbert, Steven Pinker, Ken Nakayama, Nick Epley, and Bill Milberg, as well as Hillary Anger Elfenbein, Joan Chiao, Susan Choi, Sarit Golub, Heather Gray, Meg Kozak, Jennifer Steele, and Reg Adams.

  I am especially grateful to my dear friend and brilliant colleague Thalia Wheatley, whose exemplary science is equaled only by her kind heart. Among the many debts for which I can never repay her is that she introduced me to my postdoctoral adviser James Blair, who gave me the incredible opportunity to investigate the neural basis of psychopathy with him. I am grateful for his training and guidance as I navigated a learning curve that often felt like a vertical cliff, and for his modeling a genuinely interdisciplinary approach to neuroscience. How any one person can know so much about so many different topics I may never understand. The research I conducted with James also benefited from the contributions of many other wonderful NIMH scientists, including Danny Pine, Ellen Leibenluft, Gang Chen, Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, Karina Blair, Salima Budhani, Sam Crowe, Katie Fowler, Derek Mitchell, Marina Nakic, Stu White, and Henry Yu. I am especially glad to have worked with the wise and kind Liz Finger, my indefatigable research partner during many long days, weeks, months, and years of recruiting and testing dozens of children with behavior problems. I am also very grateful to those children and their families for contributing their time and energy to our research in the hopes that what we learned from them might help other families in the future.

  I am equally grateful to all the participants who have contributed to my lab’s work at Georgetown. I thank all the patient and generous families who brought their children in for brain scans. My profuse thanks as well to the dozens of altruistic kidney donors who put their lives on hold to travel to Georgetown and take part in our research, and who have offered us so many invaluable insights into their experiences and decisions. I also thank our local non-kidney donor participants, without whom this research would have been impossible. Generosity comes in many forms, and their contributions of enthusiasm, time, and effort are sincerely appreciated.

  I feel deeply fortunate to have had the opportunity to conduct my research at Georgetown with a group of collaborators and colleagues that includes my wonderful PhD students Elise Cardinale, Leah Lozier, Joana Vieira, Kristin Brethel-Haurwitz, Kruti Vekaria, and Katie O’Connell. Much of the science I describe is theirs every bit as much as mine. I am grateful for the many projects their brilliance and hard work have brought to fruition, and for their insight, creativity, and collaborative spirit, which make coming to work every day a genuine pleasure. Thanks also to PhD students Paul Robinson and Andrew Breeden for bringing their talents through the lab during their rotations. I have worked with many outstanding research assistants as well, including my amazing laboratory managers Sarah Stoycos, Emily Robertson, and Lydia Meena; as well as Hae Min Byeon, Jessica Chaffkin, Kelly Church, Keri Church, Michael Didow, Yean Do, Zoë Epstein, Mollie Grossman, Mike Hall, Abbey Hammell, Jenny Hammer, Alexandra Hashemi, Arianna Hughes, Sarah Khorasani, Kalli Krumpos, Kyla Machell, Diana McCue, Alissa Mrazek, Esha Nagpal, Madeleine Quinn, Nilesh Seshadri, Kelsey Smith, Madeline Smith, Maria Stoianova, Michaela Tracy, and Matt Williams.

  I also thank my Georgetown colleagues John VanMeter, Rebecca Ryan, Yulia Chentsova-Dutton, Robert Veatch, and Bryce Huebner, who have contributed their expertise and wisdom to this work in myriad ways. Thank you as well to Lori Brigham at the Washington Regional Transplant Center, Reg Gohh at Brown University, Nancy Condron and Carol Williams of the Mickler’s Landing Turtle Patrol, and Paula Goldberg at City Wildlife for sharing their expertise on various facets of altruism.

  Thanks to the National Institute of Mental Health, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the John Templeton Foundation, and especially Marty Seligman and the Positive Neuroscience initiative for their staunch and indispensable support for my lab’s research.

  Of course, this book and the research it describes are not only scientific enterprises but human enterprises. And like any other human enterprise, they could never have been conceived or completed without the care and support of a great many family members and friends. From my very first research study onward, my husband Jeremy has remained my wisest counsel, strongest supporter, and best friend. He lent his fantastically expressive face to my first studies of emotion and his patience to the research they spawned. Surely any other pastime would have been more fun or interesting than reading 200 pages worth of survey responses aloud to me while I entered them into spreadsheets to complete my undergraduate thesis, but he did it with good cheer and without asking anything in return (he almost never holds this over my head anymore). And those early efforts represent a minuscule fraction of what he has contributed to my work through the years. What he has contributed to my life outside work is beyond measuring. I am grateful to be a member of a species with the capacity to love, if for no other reason than that it has given me the chance to love him.

  Jeremy also gives new meaning to the word “allomother.” He is a coparent without equal to our daughters, who are still too young to know how exceptional he is. But someday they will know. I am also grateful beyond words for our two daughters. Becoming their mother has made me a better person and been a source of greater joy and delight than anything I could have predicted.

  One of the gifts of raising them is that it has also made me appreciate my own parents even more. If this is a story that is, in some sense, about the origins of love and car
e, it is a story that truly starts with my mom Margot and my dad Peter. My earliest and fondest memories are of their devoted love and care and support, and their influence shows in every cranny of this book. That I wrote it at all reflects our mutual love and enjoyment of (some might say fanaticism for) books and the written word and our thirst to better understand this miraculous world we live in. Its subject matter reflects our shared fondness for animals, faith in science to unlock the mysteries of the social and natural worlds, and belief in the possibility of human goodness. These are traits I am proud and thankful to share with them—as well as with my brother Kirt. If Kirt and I were not three years apart in age, I would be certain we were actually twins. How else to explain his uncanny ability to know what I am thinking or what I want to say before I do? His input made this book better and truer than it could otherwise have been. The same goes for the input of my awesome sister-in-law Carolyn. Of the many gifts my brother has given me, she is definitely the best. I am also grateful for the love and support of the other family members I have gained in adulthood—my own allomothers, who include my stepmother Susan and my parents-in-law Marilyn and Clark Derrick and Ron and Krista Joseph.

  Lastly, I am deeply grateful to Marilia Savvides, who reached out to ask if I might like to write a book about my research—all of which she had already read and could describe to me with so much enthusiasm that she gave me the nerve to say yes. I thank her also for providing me with the opportunity to work with the thoughtful and skilled editors whose contributions to this book have been invaluable, including Hélène Barthelemy, T. J. Kelleher, and Andrew McAleer.