Does "pure altruism" exist? And if yes, where do we find it?
Many people donate portions of their income to help fight poverty or to support initiatives in areas such as health, education, or the environment. Also, such charitable support of the public good comes in large part from individuals in the second half of the life span: Not only do they have more absolute dollars to give, they also proportionally give a substantially larger share of their income.
Despite the global, economic importance of charitable giving, we know surprisingly little about the motives behind such altruistic behavior. Do people give because of a purely altruistic concern for others? Or are they driven by non-altruistic motives, such as showing off wealth and to bask in the "warm glow" from experiencing oneself as a charitable individual? Furthermore, are the changes in charitable behavior across the life span due to pure altruistic or non-altruistic motives?
It is relatively easy to show that non-altruistic motives do matter in charitable giving. It is much harder to prove the relevance of a pure altruistic motive.
To make progress on this front, in an article recently published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Hubbard and colleagues (2016) (PDF, 200KB) tried to exploit one key difference between non-altruistic and pure altruistic motives. Wealth or good character can be projected only through voluntary, charitable behavior for which one is actually responsible.
The outcome of such acts is less important for non-altruistic motives. This is one reason why — everything else being equal — paying one's taxes feels less rewarding than giving to charity. In contrast, a purely altruistic concern for others can be satisfied even when just passively observing that someone in need is better off — or more generally that the public good is enhanced in some manner.
For pure altruistic motives, it is the outcome that counts, not the means by which it is achieved.
The researchers measured the response in neural reward areas (using fMRI) while individuals between ages 18 to 67 passively observed money going either to charity or to themselves. Because no active giving was involved in this task, the difference in neural responses between the money-to-charity and the money-to-self condition should reflect a purely altruistic concern for the charitable causes.
Indeed, this neural, "pure-altruism index" correlated with participants' rate of actual charitable donations, which Hubbard and colleagues had assessed in a different part of the experiment. This result suggests that a pure altruistic motive is at least partially responsible for an individual's charitable behavior.
The researchers also found that a large portion of the individual differences in the neural pure altruism index, actual giving behavior, and traditional self-report measures of prosocial personality/motivation could be accounted for by a common dimension, which the researchers dubbed the General Benevolence factor.
This is an important result because it integrates measurement approaches from different traditions and disciplines (e.g., psychology, behavioral economics, neuroscience) around a common dimension that reflects a genuine concern for others.
Finally, General Benevolence with its three facets (actual behavior, neural, and self-report) showed a very robust, positive age correlation (estimated to be between r=.47 and r=.59).
Previous research has already suggested that older adults exhibit more charitable behavior. However, for the first time, these results pinpoint the motives behind the age difference in giving. Older adults contribute more to the common good than young adults because they apparently have a stronger, genuine concern for others.
Thus, pure altruism exists and it is more likely to be found in individuals at the latter half of the life span.
The mere fact that General Benevolence is stronger in older adults suggests potential for growth that could be exploited through targeted interventions. Therefore, it will be particularly important for future research to examine the precise reasons behind this age-related shift towards self-transcending motives.
Citation:
- Hubbard, J., Harbaugh, W. T., Srivastava, S., Degras, D., & Mayr, U. (2016). A general benevolence dimension that links neural, psychological, economic, and life-span data on altruistic tendencies. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 145(10), 1351–1358. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000209
Note: This article is in the Basic / Experimental Psychology topic area. View more articles in the Basic / Experimental Psychology topic area.