快猫短视频

(Image: Renaud Vigourt)

鈥淚 did it without thinking,鈥� people often say after saving a stranger鈥檚 life. The truth is, heroism develops over a lifetime 鈥� and it鈥檚 never too late to learn

IT TOOK Michael McNally about 10 seconds from hearing the crash to run from his house in the Cape Cod village of Marstons Mills to the road outside. When he got there, the car was already burning, its front end bent around a tree. Things were exploding in the engine compartment. He looked inside and saw a young woman in the passenger seat. She was about the same age as his daughter. It was clear that if she stayed there another minute she would die.

McNally, 51, reached in through the passenger window and tried to pull her out. He lost his grip, so he repositioned himself through the back seat window and pulled her through by her ankles. 鈥淭he poor girl was on fire,鈥� he says. 鈥淗er skin was coming off. It was a horrible thing to see.鈥� She was severely burned, but survived.

If you want to know why anyone would risk their life to save a stranger, the last person you should ask are the heroes themselves. Whether running to a burning car or sheltering someone from secret police, usually the protagonists cannot explain why they acted the way they did. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 know why I did it,鈥� says McNally. 鈥淚 only know that I did. I just had to act.鈥�

It鈥檚 a familiar story to Walter Rutkowski, president of the , which awards medals to American and Canadian civilians who risk their lives to save others 鈥� McNally was given one last year. The usual explanation, he says, is that there is no explanation. 鈥淲e have more or less settled into the knowledge first expressed by our founder Andrew Carnegie in 1904: heroic action is impulsive.鈥�

Compelling stories

This impulsiveness, this apparent unpredictability, is the mystery of heroism. Like all good mysteries it has inspired a host of investigators. For many, their interest in the subject is as much personal as academic: their own stories are often as compelling as those of their subjects.

鈥淚mpulsiveness and unpredictability are the great mysteries of heroism鈥�

One such investigator is Samuel Oliner, a sociologist at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California. In June 1942, when he was 12, the Nazis ordered his family to move from their home in the village of Bielanka, southern Poland, to a Jewish ghetto in a nearby town. Early one morning two months later, Nazi soldiers entered the ghetto and ordered everyone into the street. Oliner鈥檚 stepmother, sensing what was about to happen, pleaded with him to run. So he hid on the roof while the soldiers herded his family and their neighbours into trucks, drove them into a nearby forest, and killed them.

Oliner eventually left his hiding place and headed into the countryside. After three nights sleeping rough he knocked on the door of a Catholic woman, Balwina Piecuch, who had known his family before the war. At great risk to herself and her family, she took him in, helped him create a false identity and hid him from the Gestapo. Oliner is fond of saying that her act of kindness not only saved his life, it also shaped his life. After the war he emigrated to the US, entered academia and dedicated his career to understanding the selfless motivation of people like her.

Altruism has long been an evolutionary mystery. Why would anyone choose to help somebody not related to them, with no promise of reward? The usual answer is that such behaviour is an adaptation: for example, groups in which it emerged would have been more cohesive, and hence more successful. But what about acts of extreme altruism? Can we ever understand why some people risk 鈥揳nd sometimes lose 鈥� their lives for a stranger?

To try to answer this question, Oliner and his wife Pearl set up the Altruistic Personality and Prosocial Behavior Institute at Humboldt State University in 1982. In one of their first studies, still the largest of its kind, they interviewed and psychologically assessed 406 people who had risked their lives to rescue Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, along with 72 people who had lived in occupied areas but had done nothing out of the ordinary. A number of things became clear. The rescuers were much more empathic than the non-rescuers, and they also espoused values of fairness, compassion and personal responsibility towards strangers that they said they had learned from their parents.

What鈥檚 more, they were unusually tolerant: the people they identified as their 鈥渋n group鈥� consisted of the whole of humanity, not just their own kind. As , Irvine, who has studied the psychology of Holocaust rescuers, puts it: 鈥淲here the rest of us see a stranger, an altruist sees a fellow human being.鈥�

鈥淲here the rest of us see a stranger, an altruist sees a fellow human being鈥�

Samuel Oliner says this finding has held up in all their subsequent studies. It has also been replicated by psychologist Eva Fogelman, whose father, too, owed his wartime survival to the generosity of Polish peasants. Fogelman has spent much of her career studying the psychological effects of the Holocaust on survivors and their families. In her book , she recalls her conversations with about 300 rescuers of Jews: 鈥淚 began after a while to wait for the recital of one or more of those well-known passages: a nurturing, loving home; an altruistic parent or beloved caretaker who served as a role model for altruistic behavior; a tolerance for people who were different.鈥�

Further research has added weight to the idea that some people are more predisposed than others to help. In one , David Rand of Yale University and his colleagues got volunteers to play a series of cooperation and punishment games often used in experimental economics (see diagram). They found that people who cooperate in one game tend to cooperate in all, and also help out for real when offered a chance to do so, even when there is nothing in it for them. 鈥淭he basic motivators that make you want to help people apply across a lot of different domains,鈥� says Rand.

Where do these motivators come from? In keeping with the Oliners鈥� findings, cooperators are more likely to hold egalitarian values and be strongly influenced by their parents鈥� altruism. A series of also suggest that altruistic behaviour is seeded in young children鈥檚 early social interactions with adults.

There also appears to be a biological component 鈥� although whether this is inherited or acquired is not known. Neuroscientists led by Abigail Marsh at Georgetown University in Washington DC that people who had volunteered to donate a kidney to a stranger had larger and more responsive right amygdalae than normal. This area of the brain helps us recognise fearful facial expressions, something altruists and those high in empathy are adept at. Many studies have shown that people who are better at recognising fear in others are more likely to help them. The right amygdala is also notably reduced in psychopaths, who are spectacularly bad at recognising or responding to fear.

All this points to what Samuel Oliner calls an 鈥渁ltruistic personality鈥� 鈥� a set of stable, lifelong traits that consistently orientate some people towards altruistic behaviour.

Rand is now grappling with the million-dollar question: does having an altruistic personality make someone more likely to risk their life to save a stranger? He thinks impulsive heroes are indeed motivated by their personality, though this is hard to test because people rarely get the opportunity to be heroic more than once. This infrequency is a major barrier to understanding extreme altruism. Since heroes are heroes perhaps once in a lifetime, and their heroism figures prominently in the story of their lives thereafter, it is tempting for them to rewrite their personal narratives 鈥� particularly when questioned by researchers. 鈥淚f you put your life on the line for someone you don鈥檛 know, most people would want a narrative to help them make sense of the massive risk they鈥檝e taken,鈥� says Frank Farley, who studies risk-taking and heroism at Temple University in Philadelphia.

One thing seems clear, however: heroism is intuitive. It couldn鈥檛 be any other way, says Rand, because most people who find themselves in high-stakes situations are completely unprepared. This is borne out by another of Rand鈥檚 studies. He examined the testimonies of 51 Carnegie heroes to try to understand how they decided to risk their lives. In line with Carnegie鈥檚 hunch, he that their actions were intuitive rather than deliberative. Even when they had time to reflect on what they were about to do, they did not.

Take this typical response, from 60-year-old lawyer Kermit Kubitz, who in 2007 intervened to protect a 15-year-old girl from a knife attack and ended up being stabbed himself: 鈥淚 think it was just instinct.鈥� And recall McNally鈥檚 10-second dash to the burning car. 鈥淚 didn鈥檛 really have time to think,鈥� he said. Or perhaps he chose not to.

Default setting

Rand believes our reaction at such times reflects the way we usually behave in more familiar, low-stakes scenarios. So if someone is accustomed to acting altruistically on a daily basis, they are more likely to do so when the risks are high, because this is their default behaviour. Extreme altruism, then, is just that: an extreme form of 鈥渙rdinary鈥� altruism. But, Rand says, this doesn鈥檛 mean it is adaptive. Instead, it is a misapplication of an impulse to be generally helpful to others.

He also acknowledges that although altruism is necessary for heroism, it isn鈥檛 sufficient. 鈥淚f you were to put that same person in the same situation, we don鈥檛 know how often they would risk their life. They need to be in the right internal state.鈥�

Farley agrees that an altruistic personality alone does not make heroes. You also need a propensity for risk-taking or thrill-seeking, known as a Type T personality, he says. 鈥淚f you are a T Type without altruism, you may take a pass. If you are altruistic but risk-averse, you may also take a pass.鈥�

How often these personality traits come together is not known, but heroic acts are not all that unusual. In its 110 years the US Carnegie fund has awarded almost 10,000 medals, around 90 per cent of them to men, and 20 per cent posthumously to people who died in their act of heroism. Its sister organisations in Europe have awarded thousands more.

Further understanding has come from studying war heroes. Heroism in battle is a little different from extreme altruism because soldiers鈥� heroic acts are almost always inspired by loyalty to comrades rather than compassion towards strangers. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, war heroes don鈥檛 seem to share personality traits in the same way that extreme altruists do. A awarded medals for bravery during the 1973 Yom Kippur war found no personality traits that set them apart from other soldiers.

However, it is possible that they share traits or histories that have not been picked up due to a lack of biographical data. Didy Grahame, who as secretary of the Victoria Cross and George Cross Association in London is familiar with the histories of hundreds of decorated heroes, says that a disproportionate number are older siblings from a large family, sons of widowed mothers, or had other early life experiences that gave them a habit of caring and taking responsibility.

This has not been confirmed by academic research, but if it is correct, war heroes have much in common with civilian ones. McNally, reflecting on his rescue mission, revealed that he had been a helper all his life, caring for his mother after the death of his father.

Despite the indications that altruistic behaviour comes more naturally to some people than others, many researchers in the field are convinced that it can be taught. 鈥淲hile the biological predisposition should not be neglected, there is no doubt in my mind that people can be primed to change their position from bystander to helper,鈥� says Samuel Oliner. He says the best chance is during childhood, and that school curricula should include programmes aimed at instilling altruistic values.

It is also possible in adulthood, says Ervin Staub, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who has spent much of his career trying to achieve just that. Like so many others, the seeds of his academic mission were planted during the second world war. His family was among thousands of Hungarian Jews who were sheltered from the Nazis by the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. For three decades, Staub has been testing what he calls 鈥渁ctive bystandership鈥� 鈥� the capacity of people who may not be naturally heroic to help those in distress.

Staub worked with California鈥檚 department of justice following the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police in March 1991, encouraging officers to break ranks and speak out. Since 1998, he has been promoting reconciliation in Rwanda. One of his successes there is an educational radio drama designed teach people about the causes of conflict and how to resolve it, which he says has engendered more positive relations between ethnic and social groups and led to a greater appetite for reconciliation. He has also established a programme in Massachusetts to help schoolchildren challenge bullies, which can require considerable courage.

Two years before Carnegie established the hero award, his friend Silas Weir Mitchell, one of the founders of neurology, wrote a magazine article called Heroism in Every-Day Life. 鈥淢en are in emergencies the puppets of their past, which of a sudden pulls the unseen wires and determines action,鈥� he wrote. 鈥淭he gun was loaded long ago: occasion pulls the trigger.鈥�

That article may have inspired Carnegie to set up his fund. Fortunately for humanity, we now know that neither man got it entirely right. Heroes do not act entirely out of the blue, and it is never too late to load that gun.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淲e could be heroes鈥�