Abstract
When faced with the chance to help someone in mortal danger, what is our first response? Do we leap into action, only later considering the risks to ourselves? Or must instinctive self-preservation be overcome by will-power in order to act? We investigate this question by examining the testimony of Carnegie Hero Medal Recipients (CHMRs), extreme altruists who risked their lives to save others. We collected published interviews with CHMRs where they described their decisions to help. We then had participants rate the intuitiveness versus deliberativeness of the decision-making process described in each CHMR statement. The statements were judged to be overwhelmingly dominated by intuition; to be significantly more intuitive than a set of control statements describing deliberative decision-making; and to not differ significantly from a set of intuitive control statements. This remained true when restricting to scenarios in which the CHMRs had sufficient time to reflect before acting if they had so chosen. Text-analysis software found similar results. These findings suggest that high-stakes extreme altruism may be largely motivated by automatic, intuitive processes.
Highlights
Cooperation, defined as paying a cost to give a greater benefit to one or more others, is an integral part of human behavior and a cornerstone of human societies [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]
92.2% of Carnegie Hero Medal Recipients (CHMRs) statements had a mean rating below the midpoint of 4. [Very similar results were found in a pilot study where 73 Mechanical Turk participants rated the full quotes from the CHMR interviews, as well as four additional CHMR statements which did not describe the decision-process at all and were omitted from our main analysis: the modal response was the maximally intuitive value (34.0% of responses); the mean rating was 3.18; and 80.0% of statements had a mean rating below 4.]
The results for the intuitive controls closely resembled those of the CHMR statements
Summary
Cooperation, defined as paying a cost to give a greater benefit to one or more others, is an integral part of human behavior and a cornerstone of human societies [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]. A large literature across numerous fields has sought to understand the origins of cooperative behavior, and numerous mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation have been identified [5,8] These include direct reciprocity [13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22], indirect reciprocity [23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32], population structure [22,33,34,35,36,37,38,39], group selection [40,41,42,43,44,45,46], and kin selection [47,48]. We predicted that CHMR statements would involve less inhibitory language than the deliberative controls, and would not differ from the intuitive controls
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