The neuroscience of extremes: ruthless psychopathy to extraordinary generosity

Is it possible that kindness and cruelty aren’t opposites, but points along the same spectrum of human nature? Neuroscientist Abigail Marsh has spent decades studying what she calls the “caring continuum:” A range that runs from extreme altruists to individuals with psychopathy who feel little or no concern for others.

Marsh challenges the widespread belief that humans are fundamentally selfish, showing instead how neuroscience, psychology, and everyday observation tell a more complex story.

For the last 20 years or so, I’ve been trying to understand what makes people care about other people. There’s a very pervasive belief that human nature is fundamentally selfish, but I know for a fact that that can’t be true in part because my life was saved by a stranger a long time ago when I was 19. And assuming that it’s possible for people to care about one another, that process somehow gets instantiated, gets created by the brain. There must be some neural process that allows us to genuinely value other people’s welfare. And so to try to understand that better, I have been studying extreme populations of people who care a lot more about others than the average person. So for example, people who give their kidneys to strangers. And I’ve also studied people who care a lot less about most people than the average person. So, people who are psychopathic. The problem is that kind of question is really hard to answer in the confines of a laboratory, right? Because if you’re trying to understand when do people help others at some real risk or cost to themselves, it’s really hard to create a situation in the laboratory that is ethical and that could actually result in people facing serious risks or costs. That just isn’t, that’s not good to do. And so, you know, the alternatives are basically to set up very tiny examples of altruism in the lab where people are making relatively small-scale decisions to help other people that might be a little risky or a little costly, but not much. Or you could take another approach, which is the approach I take, which is sort of like a clinical approach to studying altruism. So for example, people who are interested in understanding memory will often find populations of people in the real world who have unusual memories, either who have amnesia, lack of memory, or who have unusually good memories, and try to understand what makes them different. So, the approach that we take is finding people who have done things in the real world that suggest they’re unusually caring or unusually uncaring. So, they’ve given a kidney to a stranger, for example, or they’ve hurt other people to benefit themselves. And then we bring them into the lab and we run cognitive tests and brain scans with them to try to understand what’s different about their brains, what’s different about the way they think and make decisions, and what’s different about their emotions. It’s a very common perception, I’d say misperception, that humans are fundamentally selfish, meaning everything that we do, every motivation that drives us is based in a desire for what will benefit us, that we don’t have any capacity for truly caring about other people. I think there are a couple reasons to be confident that can’t be true, and I think one of the most compelling is the existence of the disorder called psychopathy. And psychopathy is a disorder I study that just in brief is sort of a constellation of personality traits that include, at heart, being truly callous, really not caring about other people’s welfare, having sort of no capacity for compassion or remorse, as well as being socially dominant and bold and what’s called disinhibited. So, not restraining your impulses. And we know the people who are psychopathic often genuinely don’t care about other people at all. And so it defies logic for there to be such a thing as psychopathy and for humans as a whole to be fundamentally selfish, because we know what truly fundamentally selfish people look like. They look psychopathic. And if all people were fundamentally selfish, there would be no such thing as psychopathy. That would just be everybody. And so I think the fact that psychopathy exists is pretty clear evidence that people are not fundamentally selfish. And the fact that we now know that psychopathy exists on a spectrum. So it used to be thought that there were, you know, people who were psychopaths over here and then everybody else. It turns out that’s not true for almost any psychological phenomenon. They’re almost all distributed continuously, and psychopathy certainly is. So there’s very psychopathic people, somewhat psychopathic people, people in the middle. But then what’s interesting is it suggests there are also people who were sort of anti-psychopathic. In any case, most of that distribution of people definitely have the capacity to care for other people. And we’ve now seen really good evidence that this is true in neuroscience literature. We’ve identified cells in the brain that specifically seem to encode the value of other people’s welfare. We have lots and lots of psychological studies that show that people will frequently volunteer to help other people even at a cost to themselves when there’s no other obvious benefit present. And I think it’s really important to understand the answers to these questions because one thing that’s become increasingly clear, especially in recent years, is that when people believe that human nature is fundamentally selfish, one, it makes them cynical. So, you feel justified in not trusting other people and just assuming everybody’s out for themselves. And so then you can and should be, too. That’s sort of the logical conclusion of that belief. And it really erodes trust, which is the foundation of any healthy society. So, I think it’s really important for the reality of human nature based on the scientific literature to be better understood, because trusting one another is a lot more enjoyable way to be. And it’s more accurate, frankly, than being cynical. I don’t think it’s any accident that a lot of people think humans are very selfish because we are sort of suffused with a lot of pop culture that reinforces that idea. And a lot of the pop culture characters that tend to be very popular have a very sort of selfish, charismatic way of being that I think people are sometimes attracted to because it’s a little bit vicariously thrilling. And so, you know, you can think about characters like financial scions from, you know, “The Wolf of Wall Street” as a, you know, recent example of that. “American Psycho” with Christian Bale. Gordon Gekko, everybody’s favorite ‘greed is good’ character. And I think people get a little bit of a vicarious thrill out of these characters, right? Most people could never imagine acting the way that they do. And, you know, movies and popular culture are supposed to be escapist, right? Give us a chance to see what life would be like as somebody else, and that’s fine. However, I think the popularity of these characters is really doing a number on the statistical calculator in our brain that tells us what the world is really like. And that’s really what your brain is doing all the time. It’s running the numbers on the kinds of things that you’re encountering in the world to try to create sort of a portrait of what the world is like, what people are like on average based on all the people you encounter. If that statistical calculator was just using evidence from the real interactions you have with other people day to day, it would come up with a really sunny portrait of other people. I bet if the average person were to think about the last hundred encounters they had with a real person in the world, they would be overwhelmingly positive. They were cooperative, people were helping one another, they were being pretty polite and respectful. But unfortunately, so much of the information that we get now about what people are like is not coming from our actual in-person interactions, which again, are so overwhelmingly good. They’re coming from the people that we thrill ourselves by watching in the media, they’re coming from the news media, they’re coming from social media, which we know is really not an average, accurate representation of what real people are like. And it’s really throwing off our statistical estimates of what real people are like, unfortunately.

– [Narrator] Chapter 2.. Inside the psychopathic mind.

– So, psychopathy is best thought of as a constellation of personality traits. And the three key traits that compose psychopathy include most importantly a mean, callous disposition. So, really not caring about other people’s welfare. Second is a bold, socially dominant personality. And third is being disinhibited or impulsive. Once upon a time, people thought that there were these people we could call psychopaths who were over here, and then everybody else was just normal. And now I think we understand that that’s not true, and that psychopathy, like most psychological phenomena, doesn’t really operate in groups. It is a variable that ranges continuously throughout the population. So, you have some people who are extremely psychopathic, truly heartless, don’t care about other people at all. And then you have people who have milder versions of those traits. And then you have sort of most of us here in the middle. And then you probably have another end of the continuum as well, people who are anti-psychopathic, who care even more than usual about the average person, although research on that type of person is much more new. But we do have a lot of information now about what it is that’s different about people who are on the very low end of what I call the caring continuum. Because care about other people’s welfare is really the variable that is what differs across people at either end. So, people who are highly psychopathic genuinely don’t care about other people’s welfare. That doesn’t mean they can’t be nice sometimes, and this is one of the most tricky things about psychopathy. People have a stereotype that people who are psychopathic are going to look obviously deranged, obviously malign, right? And you think about characters like Hannibal Lecter, you think about The Joker, or you think about Voldemort, all of whom have accidentally depicted and portrayed psychopathic personalities clearly. In fact, in some ways I think Voldemort is maybe the most sort of perfectly psychopathic character in recent pop media. But you’d see any of them coming a mile away, right? None of them seem like they might actually be a nice person, and you can’t really tell either way. That’s not the reality of psychopathy. People who are psychopathic actually have a very narrow set of differences compared to other people. They can often appear to be sort of even super normal, very charming, very kind even, because if you want to get things out of other people, if you want to manipulate them, if you want them to do what you want them to do, one of the best ways to do that is to be really nice. And I think this could contribute to the false perception many people have that people are fundamentally selfish, and even when they do things that seem nice, it’s just driven by selfishness underneath. Because sometimes that is true, right? There are people who are that way, who are only ever nice in an effort to get things out of other people. And because they’re not that rare. So, psychopathy in its extreme form affects probably 1% of people, maybe 2%. So, we all have met somebody who’s psychopathic, right? Everybody knows somebody who’s like this, and many of us have been burned by them. In fact, most people have been burned by them at least once. And it doesn’t take that many times experiencing somebody being nice to you to manipulate you, to get something out of you, to cause some people to conclude, “Well, that’s why people are nice in general.” Obviously, that’s a mistake, right? Most people who are being nice are being nice because they do care about other people. The problem is that if you’re psychopathic, you’re good at using those exact same behaviors to manipulate, to charm, or even to exploit sometimes. So, what we know about psychopathy is I think a little bit different from the popular conception of it. First of all, I think it’s increasingly clear it’s a neurodevelopmental disorder. Some other well-known neurodevelopmental disorders are autism spectrum disorders, ADHD, some intellectual disabilities. And what we mean by a neurodevelopmental disorder is the symptoms that we see emerge early in childhood and result from differences in the way the brain is developing. And it’s pretty clear that people who go on to develop psychopathy are different from a very early age because their brain is developing differently, in ways that are due in significant part to genetic differences. Although we don’t, you know, there’s no gene for psychopathy, we don’t know exactly what those genetic differences are, only that they do exist, that change the way the child develops in a way that in interaction with other people around them result in this developmental cascade. And so the earliest emerging differences in children who are at risk for psychopathy seems to be a fearless temperament. So, this is one of the things that many parents of kids who go on to become psychopathic will say about their kids, that they, from a very early age, they didn’t seem scared about things that would scare other kids. They weren’t scared of the dark, they weren’t scared of dogs, they weren’t scared of heights, and they would do things that seemed sort of unusually risky or unusually scary without seeming to be bothered at all. In addition, they seem to not be as motivated by social rewards. So, they can come across as seeming a little cold sometimes. They might not be as interested in affection, they might not care as much when their parents are happy or proud. Interestingly, there’s some evidence that children with psychopathy are less likely to catch others’ emotions, like laughter. So, most of us will spontaneously synchronize behaviors, like we’ll laugh with other people. We catch those positive emotions. And because people at risk for psychopathy just don’t seem to have that same underlying predisposition to form connections with people, they don’t catch emotions the same way. So, fearless temperament, not that interested in other people as sort of social objects or informing connections. Not surprisingly, this results in them behaving in really troublesome ways from an early age. They do things that are risky, they do things that hurt other people, in part because if you don’t feel fear yourself, you have trouble empathizing with that same emotion in other people. So, that is what empathy is, right? It’s using the same brain structures that create an emotion in ourselves to sort of simulate that emotion in other people to try to understand how they’re feeling. And there’s very good evidence that children at risk for psychopathy really struggle to empathize with certain emotions in others that they don’t feel themselves, in particular fear. So, they don’t seem to understand why other people feel fear. They’re not good at recognizing when they’re afraid. And if you have that problem, you’re much more likely to do things that cause other people to feel fear without really understanding what the big deal is. And then, if your parents try to correct you, right, give you a timeout, give you some other healthy type of punishment for hurting somebody else, that punishment doesn’t work. Because the way that punishment works, and we know this from, you know, decades of psychology research on behaviorism, the way that punishment works is it’s a consequence you don’t like of some kind and you don’t want it to happen again, which is just a little version of fear. Anything you don’t want to happen is fear. And because people who are psychopathic don’t have a normal fear response, punishment doesn’t work very well. They don’t avoid the kinds of behaviors that will result in punishment. And so what happens is they end up engaging in all kinds of behaviors that they shouldn’t. The punishment doesn’t work. Oftentimes, this causes parents to ramp up their punishment and get harsher over time. This causes the child to have sort of more and more negative interactions with other people, reinforcing their belief that other people aren’t really worth forming bonds and connections with. And you pretty quickly get this sort of upward spiral of callous, remorseless, antisocial behavior. It’s really important to emphasize that no clinician or scientist would ever refer to a child as a psychopath. I don’t even call adults psychopaths anymore because I think throughout psychology and medicine, we’ve switched to using what we call person-centered language, which means we don’t refer to people as their disease or as their disorder anymore. So, once upon a time, you could call a person a diabetic, or a schizophrenic, and that’s just not considered helpful or healthful language anymore. And so I refer to people who have psychopathy or who are psychopathic. And when it comes to children, there’s a lot that happens during development. So, there’s a lot of kids who we might say are at risk for psychopathy, have psychopathic traits, but it turns out they don’t go on to develop psychopathy all the time for reasons that we don’t understand. Kids who are at risk for psychopathy probably go on to develop sort of clinically significant adult psychopathy, you know, maybe half the time, maybe a little bit more. But lots of them don’t. So, it’s really important not to saddle kids with labels that may not actually apply.

– [Narrator] Chapter 3. Debunking myths and labels.

– I get asked a lot, what’s the difference between the term psychopath and sociopath? The main difference is that the term psychopath or psychopathy is a scientific and clinical term, and the term sociopath or sociopathy is not. For some reason, it’s sticky. People really like the term. And so you do see it used a lot in book titles, in lots of media coverage, but there’s really no scientific definition of sociopathy. There’s no sort of clinical set of traits that constitute it. And no agreed upon definition of what it even means. The most common thing that is meant by the term sociopath is somebody who is diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. So, that is a disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or the DSM-5, which psychiatrists and psychologists use to diagnose any psychological disorder. And once upon a time, it was pretty common to call people who had a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder a sociopath. I don’t think anybody does that anymore, I don’t think. I hope not. However, that’s just not accepted terminology really in any group of professionals. By contrast, the term psychopathy is an established scientific term. It has very clearly delineated sort of symptoms and a well understood definition. There are scientific societies that study psychopathy. You’ll see thousands of mentions of it in the scientific literature. You’ll see no mentions of sociopathy in the scientific literature. So, I wish people would use just the term psychopathy. And I think the reason they don’t is, A, it’s a really annoyingly confusing term. It sounds a lot like psychopathology, which means any kind of psychological disorder. It also has really negative connotations. People associate the term psychopath with the old idea of like, the bad seed, people who were just born bad, which seems, I think, needlessly pejorative. And for a while, the term sociopath caught on, you know, maybe 40 or 50 years ago because beliefs about the origins of antisocial personality traits changed. And for a while people assumed that all antisocial personality traits were the result of social experiences. So you would develop these traits not because you were a bad seed, but because you would’ve been exposed to abuse or maltreatment or trauma. And the term sociopath is sometimes used to signify that origin of antisocial behavior. Now we know it’s a lot more complicated, right? You can never ask the question, is some outcome the result of nature or nurture because they’re always acting in combination. I think it would be helpful to banish the term sociopath, mostly because I get a little frustrated by the euphemism treadmill that we sometimes get on for stigmatized disorders. That really happens with psychopathy. There’s this attempt to keep coming up with new, sort of less stigmatized names for the concept that we are studying. But what I’ve noticed is that this makes life a lot more difficult for the people and their families affected by these disorders. It makes it really hard to find information out about what the disorder is, how is it diagnosed, how do you treat it, if you’re not even sure, like, what the disorder’s name is, and sort of what to look for or what to ask about. And so I would prefer if we all just stuck with one word, psychopathy, which has a really well accepted meaning and is already the focus of tons and tons of scientific research. I don’t think adding another term in is really helping anybody. Adding layers to the confusion is the fact that in the DSM, there is a diagnosis called antisocial personality disorder that has a lot of overlap with psychopathy. At core, they both refer to people who engage in persistent and fairly severe antisocial behavior, don’t seem to care about other people’s welfare, et cetera. The difference is that people who are psychopathic may or may not engage in any criminal behavior, right? You can be an uncaring person and not break the law. And it’s really much more about a person’s personality and their sort of internal traits. Whereas antisocial personality disorder is much more about external behaviors, in particular crime. So, almost anybody who’s committed more than one crime has a very high likelihood of a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder. I think that’s inappropriate and also unhelpful. Most psychological disorders are really focused on how is the person feeling, what is the way that they engage with the world around them? Not coming up with a checklist of behaviors that they engage in necessarily. And I think it would be better if we did that for disorders of aggression and anti-sociality as well, like psychopathy. Psychopathy is obviously a very popular topic for the media. It’s a thrilling, sensationalistic topic. And so there are a lot of really compelling psychopaths in the media that I think, unfortunately, causes people to develop a lot of false impressions about what psychopathy really is and what it’s about. So, unfortunately, most people do have a lot of false beliefs about the reality of psychopathy. One is that it’s extremely rare. It’s not. The estimate is that about 1% of adults have clinical levels of psychopathy, which is just as common as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or some other relatively common disorders. Another is that people who are psychopathic are sort of born, not made. And that’s not a hundred percent true because we now know that psychopathy results from a mix of genetic and environmental factors, just like every other psychological disorder. Interestingly, other people have the alternate false belief, which is that psychopathy is a hundred percent about life experiences, not about anything that you bring to the world. That’s also untrue. And I think it’s a really pernicious myth that the only way to end up psychopathic is if you were abused or maltreated as a child, because many families of children who end up psychopathic are too ashamed to come forward with their problems because they assume everybody will blame them, and often they do. Another common myth about psychopathy is that it’s a disorder exclusively seen in men, which is also not true. These numbers are always a little bit fuzzy, because again, they’re continuous, and where do you draw the line, but however, it is true that men are more likely to have high levels of psychopathy, with men being roughly twice as likely to have a clinical assessment of psychopathy as women are. And when they are psychopathic, it’s more likely to manifest in violence or physical aggression. Women can also be psychopathic, and sometimes can be violent or aggressive, although they’re more likely to show behaviors like emotional aggression, threatening, emotional blackmail, bullying, and ostracizing to manipulate people or to get what they want. It’s a very common myth that conflates psychopathy with violence, that assumes that psychopathy, and for example, serial killers, are basically the same thing. That’s definitely not true. Although people who are psychopathic are more likely to be violent than the average person, especially if they’re men, there are plenty of reasons that people can be violent that have nothing to do with psychopathy. And there’s some evidence that most people who have high levels of psychopathy are not violent. They may not always do the nicest things, but their disorder doesn’t always manifest as physical aggression. Another myth is that psychopathy is untreatable. A lot of people believe that if you are psychopathic, then that’s that and you can never change. Psychopathy is difficult to treat because often people with psychopathy don’t believe they need treatment and sometimes don’t want treatment. But if they can come to believe correctly that their own behavior and the way they treat people is blowing up their own life and they are the root cause of those problems, you have to use validated treatment approaches, which sometimes involve medication and sometimes involve psychotherapy, to help them learn new ways to behave and new ways to engage with other people, which we know can help both them and the people around them. Some of the medications that seem to help people with psychopathy include psychostimulants that are used to treat ADHD, for example, that seem to reduce the impulsiveness and disinhibited-ness of people with psychopathy. There’s some evidence that anti-psychotic medication can also help, not because people with psychopathy are psychotic necessarily, although some are also psychotic. But antipsychotic medications act on the dopamine system as well as other neurotransmitters that also seem to be implicated in the behavior of people with psychopathy. So, this medication may help them as well. Forms of psychotherapy that seem to be effective in adults include cognitive behavioral therapy, which involves simply learning new behaviors, learning that there are other ways to respond to situations that crop up in your life, and new ways of thinking about the world that involve overcoming false assumptions about other people. For example, many people who are at risk for aggression have what’s called a hostile attribution bias. That means they interpret other people’s ambiguous behavior as hostile, which makes you more likely to respond aggressively as a result. And you can retrain people so that they don’t interpret other people’s behavior through that hostile lens. When it comes to children, the very best forms of treatment for children at risk for psychopathy are various forms of parent management training. So the therapist trains the parents to use new approaches to managing their child’s disruptive behavior. There’s a form of therapy called parent management training. There’s another very effective therapy called PCIT that coaches parents on ways to reduce their child’s disruptive and aggressive behavior. I think the most effective resource for learning about effective ways to treat psychopathy is to go to the psychopathyis.org website. And we have a whole section for clinicians and for parents and for adults affected by psychopathy on what the effective forms of treatment out there are.

– [Narrator] Chapter 4. How we can treat psychopathy.

– The way we think about psychopathy now derives from the work of a psychiatrist named Hervey Cleckley who was a really legendary clinician who spent many, many years studying people with psychopathy in psychiatric hospitals. And he wrote a book called “The Mask of Sanity.” And I think that title perfectly captures what it is that makes people with psychopathy unique, which is that they outwardly appear completely normal, even super normal. They seem just like anybody else. But that really is a mask that’s concealing inner, profound deficits in emotion and the way that they engage with other people, in particular, a true lack of caring about other people’s welfare. Some people would refer to that as a real deficit in the ability to love other people the way that we usually think of love, as truly caring about others for their own sake. And that, I think, is the most useful way to think about psychopathy. It’s a disorder that results in people having this outwardly charming, agreeable, pleasant demeanor, often, but being really unable to connect with other people on a deep level or experience certain emotions like fear or like love. In its extreme form, psychopathy can drive some of the most serious antisocial behavior and violence that we see. So, for example, the serial killer Gary Ridgway is somebody that the FBI profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole has called perhaps the most psychopathic criminal she has ever interviewed. And it’s clear from his behavior, he killed dozens of young women over the course of a few decades. We’ll probably never know exactly how many. And also the way he talked about them and the way he responded when asked about what he had done made it clear just how little he valued their welfare. He didn’t think that they mattered. He didn’t think that, you know, that there was any reason that he should restrain his sexual urges just because it would result in these women’s suffering and deaths. And that is unfortunately the most extreme manifestation that you sometimes see in people with psychopathy. The thing that I think unnerves people the most about serial killers like Gary Ridgway, or like the BTK killer, is just how normal they seem to everybody around them. They had families. They were known members of their community, that were not caught for many years, in part because nobody suspected that they could be doing such horrible things under the surface. And that’s a really good example of the mask of sanity. There’s somebody doing things that are so awful under the surface that you would think there must be some sign of it externally. But in the case of some people with psychopathy, there really isn’t. It’s very difficult to know whether the person you’re interacting with is psychopathic just from a brief interaction. There’s, you know, some people who will tell you there are certain tells relating to the way they use eye contact or things, but I’ve never found that to be true. I’ve often said that if you were to line up all the, you know, adolescents that I’ve studied who have psychopathic traits next to all the healthy adolescents I’ve studied, and asked you to pick out who’s who, you’d never be able to. However, what you’re looking for to try to identify somebody with psychopathy is patterns and behaviors that people with psychopathy engage in. The first one is a tendency to exploit other people. So, people who are psychopathic, again, they just don’t value other people’s welfare. And so they will do things that exploit other people without any sense of remorse or guilt. So, they’ll steal things from people, they’ll steal things from stores. They’ll lie, right? And they’ll lie often easily and not really even for any reason. Like, it doesn’t bother them to know that somebody who thinks that they care about them has been deceived and might feel betrayed by that. They will cheat in romantic relationships, frequently and again without any particular care about it. They’re more likely to cheat on exams, they’re more likely to commit fraud. They’re certainly more likely to engage in various forms of aggression, especially when that aggression is aimed at achieving a goal. So, aggression can be divided into two broad categories. Reactive aggression, which is the kind of aggression you show when somebody has made you mad, when you’ve been threatened, when you’re frustrated. And then there’s proactive aggression, which is aggression that’s not really out of a spontaneous sort of rage or frustration. It’s deliberate aggression aimed at achieving a goal. So, you threaten to hurt somebody in order to take their money, or to take something that belongs to them. You threaten to reveal somebody’s secrets so that they do what you want them to do. That kind of aggression is really uniquely psychopathic. However, because people who are psychopathic are also disinhibited and impulsive, they also show the other kind of aggression, which is reactive aggression. Say you’ve been frustrated or you’ve been irritated by somebody and you lash out in response. That’s a much more common form of aggression that people with psychopathy also show. I’ve spent many years conducting research and brain scans in adolescents who were psychopathic. And some of the stories that they’ve told me over the years are really astonishing and I think really illustrate the nature of their disorder. One girl I worked with was really good at crying on cue to get out of trouble. She could feign emotions really, really well to manipulate people. And she said that she would size up adults to see whether they would be more likely to let her off the hook for, for example, shoplifting, or cheating in school, if she used really big words and sound really grown up, or if she cried and seemed really remorseful. And she told a story about one time when her mother had caught her shoplifting from the mall. And it so happened that her mother had also found in her bag a printout from the internet that was a list of instructions on how to shoplift. So, her mom knew that this was not just a sort of random, spontaneous thing, it had been planned out, which is characteristically psychopathic. The girl did not know her mom had seen this printout. So when she was caught shoplifting, she burst into tears and said how sorry she was. And because her mother knew what had actually happened, she said, “Ugh, come off it.” You know, she just didn’t have the time for the tears. And she said what was so unnerving was that when she said, “Ugh, come off it,” the girl’s tears stopped like a switch had been turned off. It had been completely a false display of emotion. The same girl took her parents’ car joy-riding on one occasion. She just decided she was looking for a thrill, stole the parents’ car keys, took the car off, speeding on country roads so fast and out of control because she was too young to drive that she eventually careened off the road, crashed into a tree and flipped the car. And when the police came across the accident sometime later, they assumed that whoever had been in the car had died because the accident was so awful. And they tracked down the parents’ house from the car’s registration, knocked on the door prepared to tell them, you know, we think that whoever took this car is dead, and there was the girl sitting on the couch eating Doritos like nothing at all had happened, right? Completely unfazed by the whole incident. It’s unnerving to hear stories like this from a girl who outwardly is very appealing, very smart, very well spoken, and there’s nothing at all to reveal the kinds of things that she’s capable of in brief conversations. So, it is hard to work with people who are psychopathic and not start to get a little paranoid or a little cynical because of the really extreme disjunction between what’s on the outside and what’s on the inside. In working with people with psychopathy over the years, it is amazing how wide the range of responses among their family members are. Sometimes their family members have just had it with them and want nothing more to do with them. Sometimes people who have been burned many times by people with psychopathy still have a strange loyalty to them, and I guess maybe it’s a little judgmental to call it strange, most charitably maybe because they recognize that it’s not really your fault if you have these traits. That’s not to say that you don’t deserve consequences if you hurt somebody and you’re psychopathic. I wouldn’t ever argue that. But especially when it comes to children who have these traits, you know, I think it’s really important that we balance our desire that they experience some consequences from what they’ve done with our understanding that they didn’t choose to be this way. And if we were to provide them with the appropriate kinds of treatment and support, they might be able to get better. So, that’s one possibility. I also think that, you know, cognitive dissonance is a pretty powerful thing. Our desire to believe that we’re people who understand the world correctly is a pretty powerful thing. And I think sometimes if you’ve been taken in by somebody who’s psychopathic, it can be quite painful to acknowledge that fact. And sometimes it’s easier to tell a story about why it’s okay that whatever bad thing they did happened then to acknowledge that they fooled you, and they probably will do it again if you give them the opportunity. In addition, again, people who are psychopathic, their ability to turn on a dime and lie and explain their behavior in a way that sounds convincing can be really disarming. It’s very difficult sometimes to generate good psychological defenses against, like, the sort of glib, charming… Gosh, I don’t even know what the word is, but it’s that there’s no sense of guilt or hesitation in explaining, you know, why you stole from somebody, or why you duped them, or why you hurt them. And we’re just not really equipped to deal with people like that psychologically, right? Most people are not like that. And it’s better that we generally trust people, generally assume that they mean well, and generally take them at their word. And so I think one of the problems is that psychopathic people are really able to exploit the average person’s psychological defenses. So, the traits that characterize people with psychopathy, the big one, is that they are callous. They really don’t care about other people’s welfare. And they’ll do things that hurt other people to benefit themselves. They tend to be bold and socially dominant. That boldness really reflects a fearless core. They just don’t respond to risk and threat and punishment the way that other people do. For example, in psychophysiological studies, when they know they’re about to get shocked, we don’t see their hands sweating the way that most people would in that circumstance. That happens to be one of the reasons that the polygraph doesn’t work, because that’s one of the things the polygraph is picking up on, is fear responses when people are lying. People with psychopathy don’t have those responses, not nearly as strongly, at least. In addition, they tend to be exploitative and deceptive. They lie, often for no particular reason, not just to get out of trouble. They’ll frequently con other people to try to get things out of them. They’ll often steal. And in many cases they’re also aggressive. So, they’ll harm other people, sometimes emotionally, but sometimes physically, to get things that they want. People who are psychopathic have very early emerging differences in the way their brain responds to social and emotional information. The biggest one that’s seen most consistently is their relatively fearless, unemotional disposition. Now, that’s not all emotions that they don’t feel strongly, they definitely get mad, they definitely get excited, but they’re much more likely to not experience fear in threatening situations. And we can see that from studies of physiology. We don’t see the same physiological changes under threat, like their hands sweating or their heart racing, when they’re threatened. And we can see this sometimes even in young children who go on to develop psychopathy. And the other critical feature of people with psychopathy is that they don’t form the same kind of social bonds that non-psychopathic people do. They don’t seem to resonate with other people’s emotions as much. So, even though they can feel pain, for example, they don’t tend to empathize with other people’s pain nearly as much as most people do, probably because they don’t feel that same sense of connectedness that’s the foundation for empathy. They don’t even resonate with other people’s laughter, so they don’t catch spontaneous laughter. And there’s even some studies that suggest they don’t catch things like spontaneous yawning, the sorts of, you know, emotional or physical experiences that transmit through populations of people that feel connected. And people who are psychopathic just don’t have that experience as strongly. Scientists have been studying psychopathy for decades and obviously have determined that people who are psychopathic tend to be very antisocial, tend to lack empathy or compassion or remorse. But only more recently have we been identifying the early, basic neurocognitive building blocks of those deficits in psychopathy. One of the big ones seems to be this deficit in experiencing fear. So, if you don’t experience fear yourself when you are under threat, you really struggle to empathize with that same emotion in other people. And that seems to help us understand why people with psychopathy have so much trouble recognizing when other people are afraid in, for example, an emotion recognition task. Most people, when you show them a series of emotional facial expressions, can recognize other people’s fear, you know, maybe 60 or 70% of the time. In people who have psychopathy, it tends to be much less than that, sometimes pretty close to an inability to recognize other people’s fear. And again, we think that’s because the way that we recognize emotions in other people, one way, is by simulating that emotion, and that helps us identify and respond appropriately. The fear pathways in human brains and other mammals’ brains have been really well articulated. The central structure responsible for coordinating the experience of fear is called the amygdala. And the lateral region of the amygdala collects information about events going on in the world. You know, have you heard a lion roaring, or have you heard a gunshot go off, things that might be threats? Pulls that information in, sends it to another region called the central nucleus of the amygdala that then sends output to other regions of the brain that help coordinate a fear response, regions like the periaqueductal gray in the midbrain that coordinates the startle response, or freezing, if something is threatening and you don’t want it to see you. Regions like the hypothalamus that control our autonomic responding. So, our hands sweating, our heart racing, our lungs expanding. And then of course our behavioral responses to fear, whether we decide to run away, whether we decide to fight, whether we decide to help others in danger. And the amygdala is not doing all of those behaviors, but it is sort of coordinating the whole show. You could sort of think of it as directing their performance. And it seems to be the case that in people with psychopathy, from a very early age, the amygdala is not developing appropriately. It tends to be too small, and that’s something that is apparent fairly early in development. The very first brain imaging studies of adolescents at risk for psychopathy were conducted and published in about 2008, including some that were done by my lab, which was then at the National Institute of Health with James Blair as the director. And we found in that research that adolescents with psychopathy have amygdalas that don’t respond to the sight of other people’s fear, which again means that that crucial structure that’s involved in taking in information about the fact that somebody else is in danger and sending it out to other regions in the brain to help you identify that state and help you respond appropriately, those sort of essential relay stations seem to be working less well than in other people. Although, of course in a brain imaging study, we don’t know exactly what the source of the dysfunction is. The amygdala also sends information to regions of the prefrontal cortex, in particular a region on the bottom of the prefrontal cortex called the rostral anterior cingulate and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. And these regions use the information the amygdala is sending and use it to guide decision-making. And because the amygdala is responsible for simulating, empathizing with, and recognizing other people’s fear, that information is probably not making it to the prefrontal cortex in people with psychopathy. In addition, the amygdala is involved in calculating the value of other people’s welfare. So, how bad or good is this thing happening to this person based on the choices I make? How bad or good will their outcomes be? That information is also not making its way to the prefrontal cortex, and as a result, people who are psychopathic are much less likely to make decisions based on how they will affect other people, in particular, how they will affect other people who are in danger. And I think that this is probably the fundamental pathway that is broken in people with psychopathy that causes them to do things that cause other people to feel fear, or that cause other people harm, because these particular pathways are just not encoding the information correctly. As a result, people who are psychopathic when they are engaged in moral decision-making and social decision-making tend to rely on a different part of the brain called the lateral prefrontal cortex, which is sort of up here, that’s involved in sort of applying rules to decision-making. And so they’ll think about decision-making in a much more sort of, kind of rational, in a sense, way. You know, am I supposed to do this, or am I not supposed to do this? Which can be useful, and it can help you get to the same decision, but it isn’t going to be as emotional and it’s not gonna be as probably motivating as a decision that’s based in true empathy for other people. There are other differences in the brains of people with psychopathy that we have suspicions about based on emerging evidence. For example, they may have fewer oxytocin receptors in the amygdala, and oxytocin receptors in the amygdala are, in other species, essential for regulating pro-social and anti-social behavior. But because we just don’t have the technology, we don’t have the data yet, we can’t be completely sure if that’s involved in psychopathy in humans. For pretty much every human psychological trait, there’s some genetic component. There was a huge paper that came out in Nature Reviews Genetics that found that on average about half of the variation on a population in most psychological traits, personality traits, psychological disorders, is due to genetic factors, with about half being due to non-genetic factors. And most of the evidence suggests the same is true for psychopathy. About half of the population level variance is due to genetic factors, maybe a little bit more than half. We don’t know what the specific genes are. There may be genes related to oxytocin, which we know is related to pro-social and anti-social behavior in other species, but that’s still quite preliminary in humans. There may be other genes related to, there’s some evidence for some genes related to serotonin or dopamine transmission in the brain that might be related. But probably any particular gene is playing only a tiny, tiny role in the way the brain ultimately develops. So, there certainly is no such thing as a psychopathy gene that we’ve identified or probably ever will. The important thing to know is, yes, there are some children born at a much higher risk of developing psychopathy than others. That’s important because it’s so common for the parents of kids who develop these traits to be shamed and blamed as though they are the cause of their child’s psychopathy. It’s very common for people to believe that if a child is psychopathic, it must be because they were abused or mistreated. And most sort of Hollywood famous psychopaths have some backstory where they were abused and mistreated as children that is portrayed as the cause of their developing psychopathy. Obviously, child abuse and maltreatment is something we wanna get rid of completely. So, that’s bad. I want to be on the record there. However, it’s also bad to assume that bad parenting is the cause of any psychological disorder. We used to assume that was also true for autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia, and parents felt a huge amount of needless shame and stigma because of that. So, some children are at high risk for psychopathy because of genetic traits. It’s not something their parents did wrong. However, that extra 50% that’s not genetic also means that life experiences play a huge role in who develops psychopathy and who doesn’t, which means that there are interventions that can work. Psychopathy is never anybody’s destiny, no matter how they start out in life. I think it’s really important to keep in mind that people genuinely differ when it comes to their motivations for antisocial behavior. I think this is very important for thinking about what’s the best way to respond when people engage in criminal or antisocial behavior. It’s important to remember that there are people, and they tend to be the people who are the most likely to be antisocial or aggressive, that are not, at least not at this moment in time, going to be restrained by their conscience, by empathy or remorse. And I think that there is a perception that if we just, you know, if everybody out there had a nice life and had what they needed, that would end anti-sociality and aggression. And unfortunately that’s just not true because of this small percent of the population that, you know, they will, unfortunately, continue to hurt other people if it’s useful for them, even if they have the option not to do so. However, they will respond to consequences. Everybody responds to consequences. The misperception I think a lot of people have is that the best way to respond to crime and other antisocial behavior is with really harsh punishment, right? And the harsher the better. And that’s clearly not true, right? People don’t respond to harsher and harsher punishments, and certainly not people with psychopathy. You know, it doesn’t matter how harsh you make the punishment, it will not deter them. In general, the best way to deter antisocial behavior is to make sure that people can’t benefit from it, right? Sometimes people engage in antisocial behavior because they get status points from it, right? Other people think they’re cool because they did it. Sometimes they get resources, right? They get money or the things they want and we can’t let that happen, because if you are reinforced by behaving antisocially, you’re gonna keep doing it. However, I think it’s also really important to note that harsh punishments tend not to deter antisocial behavior. In general, they’re not a great deterrent in the world, but they certainly aren’t going to deter people who have psychopathy. That doesn’t mean there should be no consequence for engaging in antisocial behavior, but the consequence doesn’t have to be extremely harsh to be effective. There’s pretty good evidence right now that, for example, you know, when carjacking sprees emerge in particular cities, that’s being driven by factors like social media, for example. People often like to post their exploits on social media to get likes and attention and often social rewards from people in their network who think that that was a pretty brave, bold, daring thing to do. Adolescents in particular have always been rewarded by their peer groups for doing sometimes slightly antisocial, bold, daring things. And that’s just a fact of adolescence for all of human history. However, unfortunately, social media as a mechanism for telegraphing what you’ve done has, I think, really increased the reward value of engaging in these kinds of behaviors relative to the perceived risks, unfortunately. And so I think there are ways that policymakers could be a little bit more proactive about ensuring that when people post their exploits on social media, that becomes a way to catch them, and have them experience some sort of consequence that’s not just all of their friends thinking that they’re cool and bold and daring. There are a lot of bad parenting coaches in the world, you know, who are looking to make some money by telling parents things that don’t actually work, when really all good parenting advice, including for kids at risk for psychopathy, boils down to exactly the same things. First, you have to build a strong base of affection and trust between the parent and the child, right? The child has to know that you love them and know that you care about them. But then on top of that, there have to be clear rules and boundaries, and there have to be consequences when those rules are broken. But they don’t have to be harsh, but they do have to be consistent and they have to be fast. There’s a great book out there called “1-2-3 Magic” that I think gives a really good example of how to put these principles into action. So, you have a child who knows that they’re not supposed to, like, pull the cat’s tail, they pull the cat’s tail, what do you do? You don’t scream at them, right? That’s harsh. You certainly don’t spank them. That’s harsh. You say that’s one, right? And that’s a very quick reinforcement that tells them you did something wrong. They do it again. That’s two, right? And if they misbehave a third time, they immediately go to timeout. There’s no explanation, there’s no harshness about it. They just are removed from the situation, they’re removed from anybody’s attention, and they’re removed from anything that they found rewarding about the situation that they were in. And if you can just stay consistent and give fast, reliable consequences that are unpleasant but not harsh when people misbehave, in general, that’s the the time-honored, consistent, robustly effective way to manage antisocial behavior. The difficulty with treating psychopathy in adults and treating persistent antisocial behavior in adults is that people who are psychopathic tend to be quite narcissistic and they tend to blame their problems on other people. And that’s not a good recipe for seeking therapy. If you think that you’re the best person, you’re the most important person, and all your problems are everybody else’s fault, you’re not gonna go looking for therapy. However, some people with psychopathy are insightful enough to figure out eventually that the common thread in all of the problems in their life is them. They’re the one who keeps blowing up their relationships and losing their friendships and losing jobs and causing other problems to emerge, right? It’s their own decision-making that’s the core. If you can get that insight and if you come across the right information, that indeed, these problems can be solved, people who are psychopathic can learn to interact with other people differently. They can learn to interact with them in a non-instrumental way, right? To be honest, to be genuine in their relationship with other people, rather than in every interaction, thinking about, “How can I get a leg up on this person? How can I put them in my debt? How can I manipulate them?” You don’t have to interact with other people that way. There are treatments that can change the way you interact with other people. And there are some excellent studies that show that these treatments are effective, and people with psychopathy can learn new ways to interact that make their own life better, and that certainly make life better for everybody around them. In general, if you discover that somebody close to you has psychopathic traits, whether because you have an intuition or whether because you’ve completed a formal psychopathy assessment about them, my strongest advice is that you shouldn’t take it on as your responsibility to fix it. Like so many things, this is only a problem that can be fixed when the person themselves is ready to fix it. It is sometimes the case that people with psychopathy will reserve their good behavior for a few people close to them and their bad behavior for everybody else, but it is taking a risk to count on that being the case. In general, I would not recommend being in a romantic relationship with somebody who is psychopathic unless they’ve taken the initiative to get treatment and to try to get better and have recognized that they do need to improve. If you are in a relationship with somebody who’s psychopathic that you can’t get out of because they’re a family member, for example, I do think it’s worth trying to be careful about not putting yourself in a position to be exploited if that person has shown that behavior in the past, right? I mean, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. If this person has tried to harm you in the past, the evidence is good they will continue trying to do so unless they get appropriate treatment. If they’ve exploited you financially in the past, they’ll probably continue trying to do so. If they cheated on you in the past, they’re gonna continue to do so unless they’ve gotten treatment. So, just expect their past behavior to persist because those same underlying traits are driving it. And I would say, in general, just try to protect yourself accordingly. That said, there are some psychopathic people whose behavior mostly manifests in risk-taking and behaviors that just skirt the boundaries of what is ethical. And I think, you know, every person can make their own decision about the kind of trends and associates they’d like to have in that sort of situation. It’s funny talking about this because some of the members of my organization’s board are themselves people with psychopathy, and I’ve had long conversations with them about their own lives and the treatment that they’ve got over the years. And in some cases they have long-term romantic relationships and they have friendships, and they have been assessed as having psychopathy. And so I’m judicious about how I describe these things, but the key thing is that they have gotten treatment and have learned how to treat people better. And so people with psychopathy, even if they have those traits, can learn to do better, in which case, you know, go for it. Be their friend, be their romantic partner. And I think everybody deserves a second chance if they take the steps that they need to take to actually get better.

– [Narrator] Chapter 5. The other extreme – extraordinary altruism.

– On the other end of the spectrum from people who are psychopathic and care very little about other people’s welfare are people who are anti-psychopathic, who seem to care more than the average person about other people’s welfare. People who are, in some cases extraordinarily altruistic, who do things to help others at real risk and cost to themselves, like rescuing people from drownings or fires, or donating organs or bone marrow to other people. And I also study that population because I think trying to understand why it is that they do things that the average person believes they would never do can help us understand a lot about the origins of interpersonal care and altruism. Although extraordinary altruism is not a clinical condition, obviously, it is typified by traits that set altruists apart from other people. The biggest one, of course, is that people who are very altruistic seem to value the welfare of other people more than the average person. That really is one of the most fundamental things about them, they’re genuinely unselfish. And I hesitate to say that because the image that that conjures up in most people’s minds is somebody who’s sort of saintly, right, they think of them as like a guardian angel or somehow superhuman. And the average highly altruistic person would be the first person to agree that that’s not what they’re like at all. You know, it’s not like they never swear. It’s not like they never get, you know, mad when they’re stuck in traffic. They’re just ordinary people in most ways who just happen to be less selfish when it comes to valuing other people. In addition, very altruistic people seem to be the opposite of people who are psychopathic in terms of their neural structure and function and in some characteristic emotional traits. So, for example, whereas people who are psychopathic are unusually bad at recognizing when other people are afraid, and we think this is one reason that they’re not bothered by causing other people to feel fear, people who are very altruistic seem to be more sensitive than average to other people’s fear. They’re better at recognizing it in other people, and this may be why they are more likely to respond to it when someone’s in need. That difference seems to be the result of differences in the brain that my lab has studied, including differences in a structure called the amygdala, which is a very complicated structure and it does a lot of things. But one of the things we know that it does is help generate fearful feelings and behaviors. And it is really important for helping us recognize when other people are afraid by empathizing with that fear, trying to simulate it in an effort to understand it. And we know that people who are psychopathic seem to show differences in the amygdala from a pretty early age. It tends to be smaller than average, and it’s less reactive than in other people, either when the person is experiencing a threat and so should feel afraid themselves, or when they see somebody else experiencing a threat, so, who looks afraid. And people who are very altruistic look the opposite there as well. Their amygdalas are larger than that of the average person by about 8% in some of the studies that we’ve done. And their amygdalas are more reactive than the average person to the sight of somebody else’s fear, which again, may be why they recognize it better and are more willing to help when somebody else is in need. Humans are among the most altruistic species that we have studied. And I know that might sound strange to people who have a strong media diet of all the bad things that people do, but if you put human beings in a lab, they will spontaneously help other people, even strangers, to a degree that you don’t see among other species. And one of the best analogies is Sarah Hrdy’s description of apes on a plane, right? If you were to put any other species of ape in an airplane, right? 300 strangers with no particular hierarchy or source of control, jostling them around in an uncomfortable situation in the sky for hours, it would be a bloodbath among practically any other species on earth. And somehow humans manage to do it, you know, 99% of the time without incident. So, I think that really illustrates our altruistic personality. One of the reasons that we are such an altruistic species is because we are what’s called an alloparental species, which means that we evolved to care for offspring that are not our own. Humans evolutionarily lived in small groups of, you know, 100, 150 people max, who had children that were so needy and resource-dependent that they couldn’t possibly be cared for by just one set of parents. And so in general, if you are an anthropologist who goes around the world looking at humans in all sorts of different societies, in general, human babies are cared for by all of the adults around them, not just their parents, which is really cool, because childcare is one of the most evolutionarily ancient forms of altruism. And we also know that, across species, the ones that alloparent the most also tend to be the most altruistic. And so other highly altruistic species include wolves, dogs, a lot of other predators actually, including lions, as well as some species we may not think of as terribly altruistic, including rats, for example, are extremely altruistic species. But humans do appear to be at the top. So, the things that set an extraordinary altruist apart from typical people are, first, that they have done something extraordinarily altruistic, something that the average person hasn’t done or maybe wouldn’t do, something like donate a kidney or a part of their liver to a stranger, rescuing somebody from drowning, or a fire, or maybe even doing humanitarian aid work in certain situations. In addition, people who are extraordinarily altruistic are set apart by their humility, so they don’t tend to think that they’re special or at least not more special than anybody else. They tend to think of themselves as just the same as anybody around them, despite the fact that they have actually done some pretty unusual things. And that seems to be a really core feature of altruism, because it makes sense, right? If you think you’re the most special person, why would you help somebody less special? Why would you give up things for them? Whereas if you think that everybody is equally special, helping others makes more sense. Related to that, they tend to believe in the goodness of other people. They’re much less likely to believe that others can be truly evil, and they’re somewhat more likely to believe that other people are fundamentally good. Finally, they seem to be more sensitive to other people’s distress. They’re more likely to empathize with and recognize other people’s fear and also their pain. We’re supposed to help people who are close to us if they’re in trouble, but if it’s a perfect stranger, most of us don’t see it as an obligation in the same way. And yet, extraordinary altruists I don’t think really see it that way. They really do think, “Well, this is a person, who even if I don’t know them, they still matter,” right? They’re still a human being who’s, you know, welfare is fundamentally important. And in our lab we use paradigms, like what’s called the social discounting task, where we give people the option to keep some amount of resources for themselves or split an amount between themselves and another person. Most people in this task, it’s extremely reliable, will generally prefer to share the resources rather than keeping it for themselves when it’s somebody close to them. So, you know, their best friend, their spouse, somebody who is, you know, maybe not their nuclear family, but still close to them, they’d much rather share. But then as you go further and further out the social axis, now we’re talking about acquaintances, people they barely know, they’re like, “I’m really not that interested in sharing my resources with them.” Extraordinary altruists, they’re just, you don’t see that same drop-off. They really would just prefer to share what they have with other people, which in economic terms, means that they genuinely subjectively value other people’s welfare, that those resources don’t lose their value just because they’ve been shared with somebody else. You know, one sort of controversial person in pop culture who is apparently quite altruistic is the YouTuber Mr. Beast, who’s made the news recently for having cured, it was either 1,000 or 10,000 people’s cataracts using proceeds from his YouTube channel. And it’s a really interesting phenomenon how many people are a little bit grumpy about what he’s done. But I do think, at root, it certainly counts as a form of extraordinary altruism. Now, the fact that he’s doing it for a YouTube channel I think makes the motivations inevitably a little blurry, but the goodness of what he’s done is still pretty profound. What’s interesting is there are lots of people out there who are, you know, doing really spectacularly good things behind the scenes for other people. It’s just that in general, genuinely altruistic people are really not interested in getting a lot of accolades or praise for what they’ve done. And so a lot of the time, genuinely altruistic people are really acting behind the scenes. Other people don’t know about the donations they’re making anonymously or the people that they’re helping. Although what is interesting is the number of actors who have rescued people from danger in real life, an enormous number. I mean, Jeremy Renner is an interesting example of somebody who was almost killed by a snowplow when he was trying to help a neighbor after a huge snowstorm. Kate Winslet rescued Richard Branson’s mother from a house fire. Jamie Foxx rescued a stranger from a burning truck that crashed in front of his house years ago. And I think it was Benedict Cumberbatch years ago, if I’m remembering correctly, rescued a stranger from some sort of a, I think it was a public assault or something like that. I mean, the number of celebrities who have actually helped people spontaneously in the real world is fascinating. There’s no question that the way that superheroes are depicted in movies and television shapes the way that we think of altruism, because they always tend to be a little flat and one-dimensional. You know, a character like Superman is in some ways, this is my bias here, I think a little less compelling than some other superheroes out there, specifically because he’s portrayed as so sort of one-dimensionally good and out there trying to help other people. And, you know, I’m sure that makes for a clean narrative, but it’s not the reality of actually altruistic people who are a lot more complicated and multidimensional despite the fact that they genuinely care about other people. The character of Ironman is a really interesting example because of course he is very altruistic. He does a lot of things to help other people, but he doesn’t seem like an altruist should seem, right? He’s kind of a wise cracker. He is not always the softest, cuddliest guy, and obviously he’s done some things that are less than savory in his past. But at core you can tell that he really does care about the other people around them, and he will go to great lengths to help them. And so in some ways, I think that’s a more realistic depiction of a genuinely altruistic person than the more sort of flat, one-dimensional, old school character like Superman. I think one of the reasons that many people argue there’s no such thing as true altruism, right, people are never truly motivated to help other people for their own sake, is because, paradoxically, altruism is a source of enormous joy for people who help others. And people who have donated kidneys to strangers will reliably tell you it’s one of the best things they’ve done in their life. They would do it again in a heartbeat if they could. They’re glad every day that they did it. And so it’s easy to look at something like that and say, “Oh, well then it wasn’t really altruistic, because if it brought you such pleasure, well then it must have been selfish.” I think there was actually a “Friends” episode about this exact question, but of course, it’s a philosophical question that goes back well before “Friends.” And really, I would say the best thing about altruism is that it is a source of joy because this makes people more likely, once they’ve done something altruistic, they see what a positive effect it has on other people, they experience the vicarious joy of helping other people, they’re much more likely to do it again. It’s one of the reasons we are such an altruistic species is because we take joy in helping other people. And there’s a Buddhist monk, a neuroscientist named Matthieu Ricard who in his book “Altruism” I think boiled this topic down succinctly, and I’ll paraphrase him. He said, the fact that helping others brings us joy is not contradictory to the idea of altruism. In fact, that’s what it means to be altruistic, to find it a source of joy to help other people. If we didn’t find helping other people pleasurable, we wouldn’t be altruistic. And I think this becomes obvious when you think of the counter-example, which is the person who gives begrudgingly, the person who gives and finds that a source of unhappiness and wishes they hadn’t done it, obviously, that’s not a more altruistic person than the person who helps joyfully. And so the way philosophers put it is in terms of something called the doctrine of double effect, which is basically the idea that the morality of the behavior is a factor of not just its outcome, but its intended outcome. So, if the goal of helping others was to achieve happiness, then that’s not very altruistic. However, if you help other people and given happiness as a foreseeable outcome of that behavior happens anyways, that doesn’t take away from the goal of actually helping them. Most of us would not want to be helped by somebody who helped begrudgingly. That would be a source of guilt, not gratitude. And in fact, most people, when they’re helped by somebody who they know helped them voluntarily because they sincerely wanted to, are much more likely to feel all of those positive effects of gratitude that are a source of, really, wellbeing and joy universally. I think there’s a little bit of a puritanical streak in the idea that for something to be moral, it can’t also be joyful. And I do suspect that there may be people who are suspicious about any behavior that brings us too much pleasure, that somehow it can’t at heart be simultaneously a source of pleasure and morality. But I don’t tend to think that that’s true. And I think the fact that altruism brings us joy is certainly not evidence that altruism is never genuinely motivated by a desire to help other people. Really, it’s a sign that we are a fundamentally social species, that joy is catching, that we are built to want to help those around us, and that that is the basis of a good society. And we want to be members of a society where people take joy in helping others. Effective altruism is a movement dedicated to helping people in more effective ways. So, basically, if you’re going to give money to charity, if you’re going to spend time volunteering, choose ways to do so that will bring about the most benefit for the most people. And I can’t possibly argue with that idea. However, unfortunately, some people in the effective altruism movement believe that empathy is their enemy. That somehow the empathy that often motivates us to help must be suppressed in favor of rational decision-making when it comes to how we should distribute our money or distribute our time. And I don’t think the evidence is consistent with that at all. In fact, evidence from my lab suggests that empathy and rationality can actually work together. Empathy is what gives us the motivation to help at all. And in fact, the extraordinary altruists we work with, their behavior is actually quite consistent with the tenets of effective altruism, because they’re not hoarding their help for only people who are close to them. They are giving their kidney, for example, or a piece of their liver, to whoever happens to be the neediest. And our data show that they are not less empathic than the average person. They’re actually more empathic. It’s just that their empathy is not biased. They experience empathy for anybody’s need, not just the need of a few people. And so I think what we need to do to best promote the goals of effective altruism is to cause people to value the needs of a wider range of people so that they will empathize for a wider range of people. I think suppressing empathy would actually be counterproductive. If people are interested in knowing how altruistic versus psychopathic they are, there are a couple tests out there on the internet that you can use to test yourself. One of the better self-report tests of psychopathy is called the TriPM. And it’s available on the website of Psychopathy Is, my nonprofit organization. And it is a brief but very well-validated test of that bold, dominant, relatively callous personality that typifies psychopathy. And you can get a percentile score and find out where you fall. If you get a very low score on a psychopathy test, it may be a sign that you’re highly altruistic. But another way to test that is using a personality test called the HEXACO. Most of us have heard of the big five personality traits, extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, and negative emotionality. The HEXACO adds one more called honesty-humility, and that’s a personality trait that does not have a great name. However, what it really captures is the degree to which you believe that other people fundamentally matter versus are exploitable for your own good. And people who are extraordinarily altruists tend to score very high in honesty-humility. They don’t believe that they’re more important than anybody else, and they tend to be honest, right? They don’t con or manipulate or lie to or exploit other people to benefit themselves. Interestingly, those traits were left off of the original personality scales that psychologists developed because it was at once thought that traits related to morality were not in the domain of psychology. They were really in the domain of religion, I think. More recently we think that, in fact, how moral people are is a very psychological question. And so I like the HEXACO scale because it’s added those kinds of traits back in and is probably the single best self-report measure that we have found distinguishes very altruistic people from others. I think it’s really important to recognize the fact that people’s behavior generally reflects their values, right? When people do things that exploit and harm other people, that is a reflection of their values and the degree to which they value other people. When people help others, when they do things that are kind in general, with some exceptions of course, but in general, that is a sign of their values, too, that they genuinely value other people’s welfare. And I think just recognizing that fact is really helpful because I think it helps refute the myth that when people are very altruistic, it’s because they’ve somehow willed themselves to overcome their intrinsic selfishness. In a study we completed, we asked extraordinary altruists and typical adults to make decisions that were either selfish or generous while we were scanning their brains. And one of the hypotheses we were testing is that very altruistic people help other people because they’re better at overcoming their selfish internal impulses, right? They’re just as selfish as the rest of us, but they’re better at overriding that desire to be selfish. And it turns out that’s not true at all. We found no evidence, either from the brain scanning data or from the behavioral data, that somehow very altruistic people are just using willpower to overcome selfishness. Instead, we found activation in regions of the brain, like the amygdala and the rostral anterior singular cortex, that were consistent with the idea that their generous choices reflect their greater valuation of other people’s welfare, because those are the regions that calculate the value of other people’s good, other people’s gains. And those are the regions that really differed in the extraordinary altruists. The thing that was too bad about that study is that we were also trying to see if we could make typical people look more like extraordinary altruists in terms of their brain activity and in terms of their behavior. And we did that using a loving-kindness meditation training intervention. So, we had participants in our study complete, I think it was eight weeks of loving-kindness meditation training by a world famous loving-kindness meditation teacher who created beautiful training sessions for people who really enjoyed these sessions. However, at the end of the study, when I tested their decision-making, it turned out that loving-kindness meditation training alone does not make people behave more generously. It does not make their brains respond more like extraordinary altruists when they’re making decisions. But I do think the overall findings from the study help explain that, because if extraordinary altruists do what they do because they value other people’s welfare more, the only way that we can make the average person respond more generously is by actually changing their values, right? Causing them to value other people’s welfare more. We know that’s possible, right? We know that people can come to value other people’s welfare more, but it may just be that meditation training, while beneficial in other ways, is not the way to do that. There’s really good evidence that people can come to value other people’s welfare more and become more altruistic. And we know this from looking at population data around the world over time, and it’s pretty clear that people are becoming more altruistic over time. If you look at global trends and trends within specific places like the United States, you see generally that people are donating more money over time. They’re helping more strangers over time, according to polls that are done by organizations like Gallup. Not huge changes, but they’re definitely going in the right direction. So, clearly people can become more generous, which is great. One of the things that seems to make people become more generous is when they themselves are doing better. And this maybe seems a little paradoxical. However, the data are really clear that when people are experiencing a high quality of life, when they’re flourishing, when they feel satisfied with their life, they do tend to become more generous, I think because they have the psychological and physical resources to do so. So, that’s really good news because it means that policies that promote flourishing and wellbeing will probably also promote generosity. Obviously, that’s a big lift. We can’t really do that easily or simply in our own lives. The best evidence for how people can become more generous is by just starting. It’s very clear talking to extraordinary altruists that they didn’t just start by donating a kidney or a piece of their liver. Almost all of them before that had been frequent blood or plasma donors. Many of them have donated bone marrow. And I think that’s really important because one of the absolute best things about altruism is how incredibly pleasant it is. It’s such a source of joy for most people to help others. And I really think that it’s the experience of helping others, discovering how much joy we take in bringing about joy in other people’s lives, and the sense of connection it creates to help other people, that becomes a self-reinforcing process, which is a really good thing. And so I generally recommend that if people would like to become more altruistic, you think of some small feasible way to do things to help other people, and it should naturally proceed upward from there.