Altruism

On Monday (April 14th, 2008) I attended a presentation held at the BMU Auditorium on the Chico State campus.  Dan Worthen, a psych teacher at Chico, was the key note speaker.  Dan brought up the topic: altruism, then he gave two brief definitions:

(1) Unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others.

(2)  Behavior by an animal that is not beneficial to or may be harmful to itself but that benefits others of its same race.

Dan then began giving examples of possible cases of altruism.  He told us the story of Wesley Autry, a New York man who saved another man that had had a seizure and fell onto the tracks of a New York subway.  Worthen had also talked about a village of people in France that had brought in and hid Jews from the Nazi's during World War II, a crime punishable by death.  These are examples of people helping other people while gaining nothing in return. This was followed by Dan raising the question "why should you be altruistic?"  

Dan continued by giving examples of animals that often showcased these altruistic traits.  Vampire bats live off the blood of other animals, but often after a hunt some bats return without success, this is when other bats will then regurgitate some of the blood they had gotten to give to a bat that otherwise would have gone hungry and possibly died.  Doing this obviously negatively affects the giver, or does kin selection come into place in this situation.  Worthen explained kin selection as: the decision to try to save as many of your relatives as possible because the more of your kin that are alive and well then the more of your genes are spread across the world, this is assuming of course that each relative is made up of a part of you.  

Worthen brings up the argument that people may help other people in order to recieve credit for helping,  some people may gain satisfaction by being able to look back and say " I have had personal success, as well as taking part in all these other people's success" the other people of course being people previously helped.  Worthen then told my favorite story of the lecture.  He spoke of Abe Lincoln and a trip he was taking in a horse drawn carriage, on this trip he was accompanied by a friend and they discussed altruism when all of a sudden some pigs were trapped in a mud hole while the mother pig squeled for help.  Lincoln stopped the coach, got out and saved the hogs,  his friend then proclaimed "now that was a completely selfless act, what could you have possibly gained from saving those pigs, if in fact you don't care about them," Lincoln replied "in fact this was an action I performed only because of my own selfishness, if I hadn't saved those pigs I would be worried about their well being for the remainder of the day."  Why would Abe worry about the pigs if he doesn't care about them at all? 

Altruism is a very deep concept and is hard for me to try to explain in this short blog entry, I hope from what I have posted my readers are able to at least grasp the general concept.  Dan Worthen closed up the talk by pointing out there are three general reasons we choose to act altruistic:

(1) We cannot help it.

(2) It makes you happy.

(3) Because reason dictates it. 

If any of you ever get a chance to either hear this or any talk on Altruism I suggest you do so,  and if you are really interested you can check out the book that Worthen helped write.  The conference was held in the memory of Judge Darrel Stevens who had recently passed away.