Good Health Magazine : PSYCHOLOGY : FOR GOODNESS’ SAKE : WE TEND TO SEE OURSELVES IN THE WORST POSSIBLE LIGHT, YET WE GO OUT OF OUR WAY TO ASSIST OTHERS AND AT TIMES ACT POSITIVELY HEROICALLY. THE TRUTH: HELPING IS EVERY BIT AS NATURAL AS HURTING.

Many of us are taught at a tender age not to be tender. We seem to cling to an astonishingly cynical view of what it means to be a human being. Think of the adjectives that usually follow the phrase “It’s just human nature to be . . . .” Typically they are words such as selfish , aggressive , competitive and lazy . It’s not often that someone shrugs and says, “Well, of course he helped out. After all, it’s just human nature to be generous .”

The observation that we tend to see our species in the worst possible light was reinforced when I began to write a book about the brighter side of human nature. In describing my project to various people, I got a range of revealing reactions, including:

“Is it tongue-in-cheek?”--from a thirtyish psychologist.

“Altruism and empathy! (Hearty sardonic laughter) I remember them.”--from a man in his 50s.

“Well, aren’t you sweet.”--from a woman in her 20s.

“This project is too well-meaning to be engaging.”--from a publisher’s rejection notice.

“I’ve heard of maybe one altruist in my entire life.”--from a woman in her 40s.

The irony is that although our cynicism continues unabated, a very different picture is emerging from data compiled by social psychologists, specialists in child development and other researchers. What scholars call the “prosocial)” responses of helping, sharing and caring are as central to human existence as the antisocial. Helping, in other words, is every bit as natural as hurting, and generosity often cannot be explained in terms of the benefits it brings to the helper.

Like a green shoot forcing its way up between the concrete slabs of a city sidewalk, evidence of human caring and helping defies our culture’s ambivalence about--if not outright discouragement of--helping and caring about others.

“Even in our society,” says Martin Hoffman, a New York University psychologist and a leading student of the subject, “the evidence is overwhelming that most people, when confronted with someone in a distress situation, will quickly make a move to help if circumstances permit.”

The studies to support that claim began in earnest scarcely two decades ago. Altruism researchers turned into theater directors, staging an assortment of accidents and waiting to see how many people would come to the rescue. Stooges collapsed on subway floors, made choking sounds in nearby rooms, set fires in hallways and otherwise feigned crises while their confederates busily took notes on the reactions of bystanders.

Naturally, it turned out that some people helped more than others, just as certain circumstances were more likely to elicit help, but the overriding conclusion supported Hoffman’s verdict. People of all ages usually do go out of their way to help, particularly when the need is clear and when they believe that no one else is in a position to get involved. Ordinary people often lend a hand, and sometimes, when the situation seems to require it, they act positively heroically.

Rarely do circumstances call for heroism, however. More typically, they call for small gestures of kindness, and we witness and perform so many of them that they can easily escape our notice. Argues Morton Hunt, author of “The Compassionate Beast,” we are shaken by “murders, rapes, child abuse, race riots, wars and genocide precisely because these behaviors are not what we really expect of our fellow human beings.” What we expect--and what we regularly do--is to disrupt our schedules to visit sick friends, stop and give directions to lost travelers, let another shopper ahead of us in line and donate blood for people we will never meet. Moreover, according to surveys collected by the Washington-based organization Independent Sector, nearly 90% of Americans give money to charitable causes and nearly half do volunteer work.

All this is particularly remarkable in that we are saturated in an ethic of competitive individualism, raised to believe that smart people look out for No. 1 and that those who don’t are “do-gooders” or “bleeding hearts.”

The case for a more benevolent view of human beings is especially powerful when we look at the behavior of children. Today, says psychologist William Damon, “most scholars believe that moral emotions are a natural component of a child’s social repertoire, and that the potential for moral-emotional reactions is present at birth.”

That there is more than selfishness and self-centeredness even in toddlers will not surprise anyone who has watched a 20-month-old burst into tears upon seeing a cut on her daddy’s knee, or a 30-month-old retrieve his favorite stuffed toy to console a weeping visitor. Yet the idea that concern for others must be forced down the throats of naturally egocentric creatures has persisted among some people, despite study after study substantiating Damon’s assertion.

Research has established that newborns are more likely to cry--and to cry longer--when they are exposed to the sound of another infant’s cry than when they hear other, equally loud noises. The more than 250 infants involved in these studies ranged from 34 to 72 hours old, and their cries seemed to be spontaneous reactions rather than mere vocal imitations.

Some critics suggested that the infants were simply confusing the cries of others with their own. But two researchers subsequently found that infants were more likely to cry upon hearing a tape of another infant’s cry than upon hearing a tape of their own.

What’s more, those who were already crying continued doing so when they heard someone else’s cry and stopped crying when they heard a tape of their own. Taken together, these findings suggest, in Hoffman’s view, the existence of “a rudimentary empathic distress reaction at birth,” a primitive precursor to what we think of as empathy. Our species may be primed to be discomfited by someone else’s discomfort.

As an infant grows, this discomfort continues and takes more sophisticated forms. Marian Radke-Yarrow, Carolyn Zahn-Waxler and their associates at the National Institute of Mental Health have been studying toddlers for nearly 20 years, having in effect deputized mothers as research assistants to collect data in the home instead of relying on brief observations in the laboratory. Children 10 to 14 months old can be expected to show signs of agitation and unhappiness in the presence of another person’s distress, perhaps crying or burying their heads in their mothers’ laps. As the children develop the capacity of deliberate behavior, between 18 and 24 months, their responses to distress will become more active: patting the head, fetching a toy, offering verbal expressions of sympathy and finding an adult to help.

Like parents, researchers have also observed hostile and selfish actions by children. To say that sympathy or helping behavior is pervasive and precocious isn’t to claim that every child is an angel or to deny that toddlers--particularly in a society preoccupied with ownership--will sometimes snatch back a toy truck (“Mine!”) or throw it across a room. But it is to argue that the antisocial is no more basic or natural than the prosocial.

Comforting, sharing and helping are regular occurrences by the time children are of preschool age. One study of preschoolers during free play discovered that 67 of 77 children shared with, helped or comforted another child at least once during 40 minutes of observation. After counting such behaviors in experiments of her own, Arizona State University psychologist Nancy Eisenberg became curious about why children acted that way. She came up with a technique that few research psychologists think to use: She asked the children.

Eisenberg and a colleague simply followed 4- and 5-year-olds around a preschool and watched for unprompted prosocial behavior. Each time such an act was observed, the child was asked why he or she did it (“How come you gave that to John?”). None of the children said they were thinking about how a parent or teacher expected them to behave or mentioned anything about being afraid of punishment. Very few said they expected to benefit in some way by helping--such as by impressing their peers. Among the most frequent explanations was the simple observation that the other child had needed help. “Why did I give him a cookie? Because he was hungry.”

This, when you come right down to it, is the heart of altruism. The woman who told me she’d heard of only one altruist was using a peculiarly narrow definition of the word--one limited to people such as Mother Teresa. (It never would have occurred to her to define aggressiveness so that only mass murderers qualified for the description.) To invoke altruism only when people pull children out of burning buildings or spend their lives caring for lepers is unfair because it seems to put a part of human nature beyond our reach.

However, there’s no getting around the fact that not all helping is altruistic; sometimes we do help in order to look good or ease our guilt. The 18th-Century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who believed that we always act out of self-interest, was once seen giving money to a beggar. When asked why, he explained that he was mostly trying to relieve his own distress at seeing the beggar’s distress.

His explanation will ring true for many of us. But is this always what’s going on: helping in order to feel good or to benefit ourselves? Is true altruism a Sunday school myth? Not necessarily. Lawrence Blum, author of “Friendship, Altruism and Morality,” says there are serious weaknesses in the so-called egoist position that Hobbes defended and that seems to dominate the American mind. Many automatically assume that “an apparently unselfish action is really selfish deep down”--not because there’s good evidence for the belief but because of our basic assumptions about human nature. Blum emphasizes that such assumptions must be proved, just as the altruist’s view has to be proved.

Ask yourself, philosophers like Blum say to egoists: What would it take to persuade you that people really do help for altruistic reasons? If you can’t imagine a situation that would prove you wrong--if you insist on your self-interest explanation regardless of what you see--then your position isn’t very strong. The conclusion: If people seem to be acting without thought of personal gain, such as Eisenberg’s preschoolers, there’s every reason to believe that’s exactly what’s going on.

“But we feel good after helping someone,” replies the egoist. “Doesn’t that prove it’s not really altruism?” Not at all. The key question is whether feeling good was the chief reason for helping. Ervin Staub, a psychologist and an influential investigator of prosocial behavior, observes that altruistic people “simply respond out of who they are--spontaneously, without thinking about themselves.”

Still, Blum warns, demonstrating genuine altruism is no easy task. “It’s an age-old issue, and it’s never going to be proved by research one way or the other,” he says. Consider people who perform extraordinary rescues. A man who leaped onto subway tracks in New York City to save a child--very nearly losing his own life in the process--told a reporter that had he not acted, “I would have died inside. I would have been no good to myself from then on.” In an Air Florida crash more than a decade later, a man who dove into the Potomac River to pull someone from a car that had been knocked off a bridge by the plane said, “I couldn’t watch the guy drown. I think I jumped into the water out of self-defense. I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if he had drowned and I had done nothing.”

Were these people responding to others’ needs, or were they ultimately concerned about their own emotional well-being? Psychologists scratch their heads over this, but perhaps our response should be to celebrate. The fact that most of us do feel better when we help others suggests an interdependence that speaks rather well for our species.

But C. Daniel Batson, a researcher at the University of Kansas, isn’t satisfied to let it go at that. Batson has spent more than a decade in his laboratory creating artificial situations “in which one person is confronted with an opportunity to help another perceived to be in need” and manipulating the situation to determine the helper’s motivation. From these intricate experimental designs Batson has attempted to find out whether some people help out of honest-to-goodness altruism rather than out of self-concern.

The answer, he says, is yes--at least for people who respond to other people’s distress with sympathetic concern. Any benefits, emotional or otherwise, that these folks might realize are “not the goal of helping; they are simply consequences of helping . . . because the ultimate goal is to increase the other’s welfare, not (their) own.”

Batson came to this conclusion by setting up experiments in which subjects could reduce their distress easily by escaping from the suffering victim. In one of his early studies, there was nothing to stop college students from simply ignoring a written appeal to help a senior whose parents had been killed in a car accident. But it seemed that sympathetic students were not interested primarily in relieving their own distress; they wanted to help the young woman and they agreed to do so even when they could have simply left the room.

Even if we don’t help simply to avoid distress, we may be acting in order to think better of ourselves. So Batson set up another group of studies, reasoning that if a potential helper feels just as pleased when someone else steps in to rescue a victim, the would-be helper may not have been interested in taking credit himself for being a rescuer but only in making sure that the victim’s distress was relieved--an altruistic motive.

That’s exactly what happened when Batson told his subjects that they might be able to help someone (whose voice they had just heard) avoid mild but unpleasant electric shocks. A little later, some subjects were informed that the other person would not be receiving shocks after all. Those who had scored high on a questionnaire-based measure of sympathetic response to the other’s plight reported a more positive mood if the other’s shocks were avoided--even though that person had been spared through no action of their own.

Finally, Batson took on the skeptics who say prosocial behavior is merely a strategy for avoiding guilt. He made it easy for another group to avoid helping by requiring them to pass a test to qualify as a helper. If they were told that most people could not pass the test, the subjects who volunteered simply to stave off guilt feelings presumably could justify failing it and thus not helping; it was not their fault. If, however, they made a serious effort to pass even when given an “out,” Batson figured they were truly interested in helping the victim. Sure enough, some people worked hard--presum- ably because they cared more about the victim than about soothing their own consciences.

Batson admits that concern for others can be “easily crushed by overriding egoistic concerns.”

But experiments like Batson’s seem to show that not only helping but altruistic helping does exist. David Collard is one of the few economists who has come to the same conclusion.

Says Collard: Perhaps it isn’t that selfish men sometimes appear to behave unselfishly, but that unselfish men sometimes appear to behave selfishly.”