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An The ancient philosophical chestnut concerns the question of what motivates acts of altruism: altruism or personal interest. Some argue that humans are most likely to help others in contexts where their actions also indirectly benefit themselves or their loved ones and their loved ones.
Scientists have mainly attempted to resolve this enigma by observing behavior and found that if people act in the interest of others, they are less likely to do so when they are dealing with members of external groups and will often deceive foreigners in economic games.
Recently, however, a team of scientists addressed the question of what guides altruism from the point of view of motivation. The team, including Kyle Law, a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University, and PH.D. The student Bae of Boston College, studied the anonymous responses of the investigation of nearly a million individuals spread over more than 100 countries, taking into account cultural contexts, age groups, socioeconomic levels and periods. They found that the vast majority pointed out acts of altruism accomplishing because they were interested in the well-being of others, and not because these acts benefited them indirectly.
“People are more likely to want us to remember him for making a difference, helping others and improving the world”, explains Bae, “to value things as taking care of their status or personal gains”.
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Scientists have evaluated the motivations of altruism acts in three different dimensions: heritage (how they wish to remember), the aspirations of life and fundamental human values. They used different data sets for each dimension. For their analysis of the inherited motivations, they carried out secondary analyzes on the data of 8,000 people out of 22 samples previously taken from world populations. Their analysis suggested that when you think about the type of inheritance they want to leave, people are much more likely to point out to be motivated by a positive impact on the world than by strengthening their reputation. “It shocked me,” said Law.
People are more likely to value things such as worrying about the status or personal gains.
To identify how the aspirations of life shape the motivations to perform altruistic acts, they analyzed the responses of 59 study samples in 22 countries collected for two decades. In this analysis, they found that people were much more likely to declare to be motivated by values such as personal growth and donations from the community than by values such as wealth or fame. In the final analysis, which examined how fundamental human values shape altruistic motivations, they used three large -scale global data sets – one of the undergraduate students, another of the mainly European adults, and a third of individuals of a more geographically diverse set of 78 countries – and have found that values such as universalism and bares were more diverse motivations reported altruism than values such as power, lydonism and completion. They also found that more individualistic countries, such as the United States, in fact obtained a higher score on the motivations of other focused than more community motivations like Japan, a surprising conclusion, because individualist cultures are often considered more selfish.
Trying to understand why people act as they do by simply asking them to explain their behavior is generally considered with skepticism by researchers in psychology, and for a good reason. We often do not know why we act as we do and invent a reason on the spot without realizing it, and this reason can be selfish. Psychologists call this “confabulation”. Another problem perhaps more important is the “bias of social desirability” – people will often say to researchers what they think they want to hear or what they think will impress the experimenter.
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This study was based on self-assessment, which is subject to both biases. However, people present less this bias in anonymous surveys like those used here. In addition, respondents to the survey that scientists analyzed included populations of identifiable altruistic people: people who give organs to foreigners and others who belong to the effective altruistic movement, which focuses on the most effective means of helping the maximum number of people in the world. If the average respondent inquiry was simply trying to seem well, rather than thinking honestly about their motivations, we could expect them to get a score similar to organ donors, reasoned the researchers. But they didn’t do it. Altruists and effective organ donors had much higher scores on altruistic motivations.
“We expected a certain difference, but the magnitude was really striking, and that made the house for us the idea that they are not only people who behave differently,” said Law, “they seem to think differently, appreciate different things and give priority to help others at a level of deep motivation.
We must take care not to assume that people are always selfish. It is also a bias. Human motivations are difficult to discern. Studies show that when the observation of others performs acts of altruism, we tend to assume that they do so to benefit from their reputation, but we do not apply this bias to ourselves.
“The study is important because our hypotheses linked to human nature shape everything,” explains Bae. “If we assume that people are mainly interested, we conceive systems around incentives, competition or punishment. But if people are motivated by the concerns for others … We can build systems that feed and amplify these motivations in a very positive way. “
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Of course, motivation does not always lead to action. But there is comfort to know that the motivation to be good is there. We just need to learn to draw from it.
Lead image: Connection / Shutterstock
