Hearing about the three American friends and one British businessman, who bravely thwarted a gunman’s attack on a French passenger train, had many of us wondering: What causes people to risk their lives to help strangers?
According to a recent analysis of 51 recipients of the Carnegie Medal for heroism—which is awarded to those who risk their lives for others—researchers found that most of these heroes described their actions as fast, intuitive, and never carefully reasoned (Plos One).
Other everyday heroes, who have risked their lives to save others, have echoed the same sentiment. Christine Marty, a college student who rescued a 69-year-old woman trapped in a car during a flash flood, said she was grateful that she didn’t take the time to reflect: “I’m thankful I was able to act and not think about it.”
The researchers found almost no examples of heroes who had to overcome an initial impulse for self-preservation with a conscious, rational decision to help. In other words, it’s brute instinct that leads to such moral acts, not stopping to first think about it.
So why do some people develop these instincts?
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Here’s what the researchers deduced to be possible explanations:
- Helping others pays off in the long run in most everyday situations.
For instance, if you buy lunch for a friend or help a colleague meet a tight deadline, you will probably find yourself repaid in kind, or even more, down the road. So it’s actually beneficial to develop a reflex to help — especially because the cost to you is usually quite small.
- There is a benefit to developing a reputation as someone who helps without thinking.
Those who automatically help others are treated as more trustworthy and build stronger relationships with others in the long-run.
According to a game theory model called the “envelope game,” introduced last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the tendency to help without first weighing the consequences is always beneficial when:
- The cost of helping is so big that stopping to think about it would certainly lead to not helping.
- The result of not helping would have very harmful consequences for the person that needs help.
- The cost of helping is very small, so that the benefit of helping and building the relationship makes helping worthwhile.
- The long-term relationship is valuable to the potential helper.
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- Military training helps to hone cooperative instincts.
While many heroes have no military or other formal training, a good number of them do. Soldiers can find themselves helping others at enormous personal risk; and they live, train and work together for relatively long periods, during which they have plenty of opportunities to observe whether a peer helps others without thinking.
Every day, everyday people are doing good and helping others. But the research shows us they don’t just do good … they do good instinctively.
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Curated Article from The New York Times
Relevant Sources and Studies:
Plos One
PNAS
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