The Washington Post reports:

Abigail Marsh, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Georgetown University, studies extraordinary altruism — people who jump in to rescue strangers in emergencies or donate a kidney to someone they don’t know. Marsh spoke with Cristina Quinn, host of The Washington Post’s podcast “Try This,” about what her work has uncovered, and what brain science reveals about people who habitually engage in selfless acts. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You often trace your research back to a scary incident when you were 19. How did that influence what you study now?

Many years ago, I was driving late at night when a dog ran into the highway. I swerved, my car spun across traffic, and I ended up facing backwards in the fast lane with no way to move. I truly thought I would die.

A stranger — a man I’d never met — stopped his car, ran across six lanes of freeway and got into my stalled car to steer me to safety. He checked that I was okay and then disappeared into the night. I don’t know his name. I know nothing about him. I don’t think I said thank you.

Many details of the evening haunt me. But the biggest one is that I think I would have died if it hadn’t been for the actions of this stranger who made a split-second decision to try to save my life.

It’s one thing to read about heroism. It’s another thing to know that you owe your life to this kind of a decision. And so that really stuck with me.

What is an altruist?

Most people engage in acts of altruism. So we’re all altruists, at least some of the time. But altruism is generally defined in psychology as a behavior that helps somebody, and that was the intention of the behavior. Or you helped somebody specifically because you wanted to help them, not for some underlying reason.

The group you’ve studied most closely is people who donate a kidney to a stranger. What makes them different?

Genuinely altruistic people are very humble and less selfish than other people. And it turns out that humility and being unselfish go hand-in-hand because if you think that you’re the most special person around, why would you want to help less-special people? And so truly altruistic people do not think of themselves as special.

And when we bring them to our lab, we find differences in their MRI scans. One of the most striking is that altruistic kidney donors tend to have a larger amygdala, a part of the brain critical to processing emotions, particularly fear in others. They are especially sensitive to others’ distress and responding empathically. [Continue reading…]