Perhaps you have heard the story of the Polish Franciscan friar who volunteered to die in place of a total stranger at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1941. When Nazi guards selected ten prisoners to starve to death in retaliation for an escape, one of those men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out for his family. The friar, Maximilian Kolbe, stepped forward to take his place.
It is hard to imagine a more selfless act. But the concept of selflessness has long been the subject of intense debate among theologians, economists, philosophers, and biologists. English philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously argued that every human action is ultimately driven by pure self-interest: If you help someone at a cost to yourself, you do it because it relieves your own empathic distress or puffs you up with pride.
Read more: “How Discovering an Equation for Altruism Cost George Price Everything” For biologists like Richard Dawkins, altruism toward one’s kin or tribe is an evolutionary imperative: It helps to ensure the survival of the group, the species or some twist of shared DNA. More recently, neuroscientists have found that altruism stimulates the same regions of the brain that are triggered by pleasurable experiences like eating chocolate or winning a game. One question at the core of the debate over the nature of altruism pertains to how it is perceived by others, including the recipients of the good deed and the broader public.
Professor of clinical psychology Jennifer Cheavens of Ohio State University, who teaches a positive psychology class to undergraduates, recently took inspiration from her students to investigate this question. Cheavens’ students argued that there is a distinction between acts that are kind and acts that are nice. Nice is doing a good deed out of obligation or to win reputation points, and is not perceived favorably by others, they held.
Kind is doing something without the expectation of any transactional reward, and is perceived more generously. But what Cheavens found in the lab was the opposite. Cheavens teamed up with her colleague Laura Wagner, a developmental psychology professor and linguist at Ohio State University.
Together they recruited 736 mostly white participants from the United States to read and rate vignettes describing prosocial behavior—described as any action that benefits individuals or society as a whole. What they discovered was that prosocial behavior was almost universally considered a positive thing among their participants: “At least kind, maybe also nice and possibly even caring,” Cheavens said in a statement. Acts that were planned in advance, performed with warmth, and delivered without expectation or obligation were seen as warmer, kinder, and more caring.
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