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Episode 7: Heroism and Heroic Actions: Stephanie Preston
17 Plays5 years ago
Dr. Stephanie Preston is our guest for this great conversation about the neural and evolutionary underpinnings of heroic behaviors. She proposes that heroism can be found across the phylogenetic spectrum, and acts of human heroism may have significant roots in conserved behavior patterns -- for example, the instinct for mother rats to retrieve and protect their young even at the risk of great personal danger.
We discuss what qualifies as heroism, how situations can cue (or inhibit) heroic behavior, and what the evolutionary advantage might be to put one's own genes at risk to save the life of another.
We also discuss the field of evolutionary psychology as a whole, and the way in which researchers think about it differently than it is often represented in popular press.
Special Guest: Stephanie Preston.
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Transcript
Introduction to Cognation Podcast
00:00:06
Speaker
This is Cognation, the podcast about cognitive psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, technology, the future of the human experience, and other stuff we like. It's hosted by me, Rolf Nelson. And me, Joe Hardy. Welcome to the show.
Introduction to Dr. Stephanie Preston
00:00:25
Speaker
Our guest today is Dr. Stephanie Preston.
00:00:28
Speaker
Stephanie runs the Ecological Neuroscience Lab at the University of Michigan. Her broad goal and lots of research that she's done has been in studying emotion and decision making. She's done a whole bunch of cool stuff on empathy, altruism, some nifty research on hoarding. So we are super pleased to have Stephanie on the show today. Thanks for joining us. Oh, it's my pleasure. I'm happy to be here.
Understanding Heroism
00:00:55
Speaker
So the specific topic that we're going to kind of center things around today is a paper that Stephanie had I think it's 2016 in an edited volume and it was called the evolution and neurobiology of heroism. So maybe I will let you introduce the topic and talk a little bit about what you mean by heroism and how you think about it.
00:01:19
Speaker
Great. Well, this chapter was based on a psychological bulletin article I wrote in 2013. It's like a theoretical review paper and it describes what I believe is like an evolutionary and neural basis for heroism. And by heroism, I mean times when people make a very active, spontaneous, immediate response, a physical response to help somebody
00:01:48
Speaker
in urgent need of aid. So you think of a prototypical case where, for example, we hear news stories about somebody who jumps into the subway track to pull out the person who fell in, or you grab back your kid who's about to enter the street and pull them back by the coat, you know, or people are jumping into the river to save somebody from drowning or rushing into burning buildings. This is the kind of thing that people think of as the prototype of heroism.
00:02:17
Speaker
But it hasn't been something studied very well in psychology to date. Yeah, and it seems like the point here of what makes this interesting is that these are situations where a person is putting themselves out there physically
00:02:33
Speaker
in harm's way, potentially at some cost to themselves to help someone else who may or may not be related to them. So this is not the same thing as what we sometimes use the term hero to describe someone who's just doing a very good job at whatever it is that they're doing. For example, like a really great football player, or even I was thinking about the case of Sully the pilot who landed his plane in the river. Yeah, he's like the first person that I would
00:03:00
Speaker
It sort of conjures up because he was called a hero by everybody. I don't think that would really count here because he's also saving himself in the end. There's no self-sacrifice, right?
00:03:13
Speaker
Right. And and then also in that case, he doesn't really have any alternatives. Yeah. So he was just smart. He just did. He was just awesome. Right. Yeah. Like, should I try to safely land the plane or not? You know, he didn't really have like a viable alternative. Whereas in this prototypical case where a stranger might help somebody that they come across in a public place, they have an alternative, which is to not act.
Evolutionary Basis of Heroism
00:03:40
Speaker
Right. So why does somebody act?
00:03:43
Speaker
when they could do nothing, and a lot of times people do nothing or other bystanders do nothing, but they choose to help. And even in cases where, as Joe said, you're putting yourself at risk and danger and even a threat to your very life. So from an evolutionary perspective, it doesn't really make that much sense on the face of it, right? Like why would people ever do that?
00:04:07
Speaker
you think that a gene that would cause you to act in such a way would have long ago been eliminated. So it's an evolutionary puzzle how you have this behavior that has remained in the gene pool for hundreds of thousands of years and hasn't been weeded out. So it must be providing us with something that we do need. And there's been a little bit of debate about this, but I think I have like my own personal view.
00:04:35
Speaker
is that it's rooted in this need to care for your own offspring because you need these sort of urgent, highly motivated, attentive responses to distress and need and injury to take care of your own related offspring and you're 50% related to your own offspring. So there's a high evolutionary pressure to maintain the survival of your own offspring. But once you have the sensitivity
00:05:02
Speaker
know you're very sensitive to hearing cries or distress and it makes you uncomfortable and it makes you concerned and it motivates you at this emotional and physical level then it can I think be enacted even in situations where you're faced with a stranger. I mean I do think people help their own relatives more than they would help a stranger but you still enter this highly motivated state
00:05:26
Speaker
um, that sort of prepares a response. And then whether or not you actually act depends on all these other variables. Like, are you competent? Can you swim, right? Can you land a plane? Can you lift the body out in time? Are you strong enough? Are you fast enough? So people, I think their motor systems implicitly can calculate these things, you know, in milliseconds. So that is in a way the fail safe, right? So people don't rush into situations that for sure are going to kill them.
00:05:56
Speaker
because your brain is already designed to make these very fast, intuitive calculations about your capabilities. But then if somebody does think they're capable and they're not particularly risk-avoidant as a trait, then they will help a stranger in need, even though they're not related. That's my view of it. Yeah. So there's like 50 billion things there. It's such a whole bunch of cool ideas.
00:06:21
Speaker
to make sure we're on the same page. So the idea is that it evolved from a mechanism that is genetically adaptive. In other words, that may provide a benefit most directly to offspring, but as a side effect of this, so you get heroes who are naturally driven to do this for selfish reasons or genetic reasons, but then as a side effect, you happen to help other people too.
00:06:48
Speaker
So maybe not as directly intentionally, but that's where it came from. Right. So in my view, it's the side effect, right? You have this highly adaptive propensity that you need to have to raise your own offspring because humans and mammals, unlike some other species, take a really long time to develop to the point where they're independent, right? So you wouldn't leave your kid alone to their own devices
00:07:17
Speaker
um, travailing the town until they're almost 10 years old, right? Even if we were highly permissive, we'd probably wait until they're at least six years old, right? And that's a really long time to be responsible for the safety of a helpless organism. So we really do need this capacity. Um, and so the side effect is there and then other people focus on
00:07:41
Speaker
there are possibly adaptive benefits to the heroism per se. Like, for example, oh, the whole town celebrates you and there's a parade in your honor and your family name has gained so much respect because you've been heroic in the public act. And maybe you even win a prize or, you know, the key to the city or something like that. Or when your family is in need,
00:08:05
Speaker
because you've been shown to be such a helpful, kind, generous person. It gets paid back. Right. That's the reciprocity argument, right?
Social Benefits of Heroism
00:08:14
Speaker
Like if you're helpful to others, people will be helpful to you, which isn't super useful in a case where you might kill yourself, right? Like, yeah, right. It's not that great for your genes to have died in the act. So to me, those are like possible fringe benefits.
00:08:31
Speaker
But they aren't the reason that we have this capacity. It didn't evolve for that fact. So I would think it's useful to have heroes in society. And I would I mean, as a you know, if I were watching out for my genes, I would highly encourage other people to be heroes and save me all the time. And I think that's a great idea. And I would be happy to cheer them on. Yeah, there is like research in modeling and evolution suggesting that
00:09:00
Speaker
having like a general capacity for beneficence is beneficial to the group as a whole, right? So if we generally are cooperative, it helps us not only share food and aid with one another, increases the survival of the group, but it's also especially valuable, say, if the neighboring tribe tries to invade, right? And we need to work together against this common enemy, as it were,
00:09:28
Speaker
And so a lot of people focus on that attribute. And I do think that is useful in things like food sharing and grooming and resource allocation. I have food one day, you have food another day, we're kind of working together or we have to hunt or fight. But again, I do think that the specific characteristics of when people are driven to be heroes in the face of
00:09:52
Speaker
distress and cries and need mimics these offspring care situations. And we even see this in rats, even rat mothers caring for babies. When they hear these vocalizations of a stranded pup, a baby rat, they will rush to retrieve the pup, even one that's not related
Heroism's Rarity and Genetic Persistence
00:10:12
Speaker
to them.
00:10:12
Speaker
and they'll do it over and over and over again for hours. If you keep putting pups in front of them, they'll keep saving them. So it's, I think, a very ancient capacity that's evolved in mammals, not just humans. Yeah, I think one of the things that you mentioned in the paper is that one of the marks of heroism is that it's quite rare. You're explaining where this might come from, this capacity to be a hero,
00:10:41
Speaker
but the mark in some ways of a heroic act is that it is relatively rare. And you talk a bit about that in the paper, I think might be interesting to kind of delve into that a bit. Yeah, and I think that's part of why it doesn't end up getting weeded out of the gene pool, right? So because it's fairly rare that you would help a stranger in such costly, dire situations, there isn't actually,
00:11:08
Speaker
you know, sufficient frequency of events to kill off enough people to take the good of this gene or to cause it to be refined such that you only help your own offspring. So for example, there's a lot of reasons it's rare, right? In general, people who can't swim don't go, you know, diving into cold water. In general, people don't keep open fires in their homes. In general, like people don't wander out into the street in front of cars.
00:11:36
Speaker
So people have their own mechanisms for preventing themselves from getting into danger, which also, you know, prevents us from having to be heroes. And then even when there's these situations, a lot of people don't feel competent to help. So they're not, you know, going to be contributing to this cost. And the people who do help are those who, you know, their brains have already calculated that there's a good probability that they'll survive and be able to save themselves and the other individual.
00:12:05
Speaker
So, you know, it's rare and it only occurs in situations where the cost is not super likely. So that is a way in which this propensity to help your distressed offspring doesn't need to be even more refined because it's pretty rare that these really deathly situations happen. Right. And the rarity of it sort of seems to take care of itself because if you start having
00:12:33
Speaker
Lots and lots of heroes in a group of people, they tend to weed themselves out pretty quickly, right? Yeah, it's also just pretty unlikely that that's going to happen. But that's also what makes heroes amazing, right? Because it's rare, that's why it's so interesting to us and why we want to pay attention to it and read about it in the newspaper and why it's like
00:12:56
Speaker
you know, lauded in society because it's rare. If just anybody would jump into an icy river, you know, and pull people out, it wouldn't be that surprising. I think what makes a hero considered brave or courageous is because they have done something that we ourselves can't imagine doing. And that's what makes it special.
00:13:16
Speaker
Yeah, and I think some of the terminology that you use too, and I think people just use in everyday life, is that if there's a heroic act, you refer to the person as a hero. So it's a characteristic or a personality trait of them that they're likely to do this often or that given the right circumstances, they prove themselves and show themselves to be hero worthy. Whereas, and this might be a little bit of a distinction between heroism and smaller acts of altruism that you normally don't
00:13:46
Speaker
You think of altruism as much as a personality trait. You think of it as an act. There's an altruistic act that'll happen. But heroism, you create a hero out of it. Even if it's just one or two heroic acts, then you've got a person who is now a hero. Yeah, and I do think that's also part of the rarity of it. I think if you think of every trait as we call it normally distributed, right? Like most people are average in some capacity.
00:14:15
Speaker
So most people have an average capacity for risk taking or caring about the welfare of strangers. And if we all have this like normal distribution, you and I by probability are likely to just be medium on this trait, but there's going to be some people who are far out on this distribution to the right and they have a just for whatever reason, right? So genetics, how they were raised.
00:14:41
Speaker
you know, how confident they are in themselves, how much they care about other people, how much this was emphasized growing up as an important cultural or family attribute. There are going to be some people who are on this extreme. And I think that's why you can have like a trait hero, like somebody who is risk seeking and feels competent and, you know, was raised to assume that's the right thing to do.
00:15:07
Speaker
And that's also what makes it rare and prevents it from being weeded out of the population because it just exists in these small amounts. But I do think you can have trait heroism, just like you have trait altruism because, you know, your environment surely influences this, but they do have that phrase. Isn't there a phrase like an unlikely hero? Yeah. Reluctant hero, maybe. Yeah, a reluctant hero.
00:15:31
Speaker
you know, you weren't bred and born to do this fact. So that is kind of like, yields a little insight into the way we think about heroes as a trait. You're right. Yeah.
Triggers of Heroic Behavior
00:15:47
Speaker
One of the things, and I think it was really interesting, you bring this up in the paper is I think a lot of ways that social psychologists think about this as like the bystander effect, the idea that a lot of acts of altruism or, you know,
00:16:01
Speaker
outstanding acts are effects of the situation rather than the individual. So if there's a lot of other people around, you might get some sort of collective diffusion of responsibility so that nobody goes over and helps that person in need, but it can be manipulated by the environment around it. I hate to even give this press, but have you seen
00:16:23
Speaker
Darren Browns has a couple shows on Netflix that you can see about this. Now, these are worse than the Milgram experiments. One of them is called The Push, where he convinces people to think that they're pushing someone to their death through this long, intricate series of events where he's got people colluding with him, lots of actors.
00:16:46
Speaker
And he also has another show called The Sacrifice, where he, through this long, complicated process, manipulates them into seemingly taking a bullet for someone that they originally didn't like. So it's certainly not gonna be all situational, but how do you calibrate situational versus this kind of trait heroism in the way that you think about it?
00:17:12
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think that the situation plays an extremely strong role in the fact that if we have this characteristic that evolved from offspring care, it's basically stimulus driven, right? And so you don't like rush to help the baby who's just sitting there calmly. You rush to help the baby who like cries out in this distress cry that, you know, isn't just, you know, hunger, fatigue or something. Like when you hear that scream,
00:17:40
Speaker
that's a particular frequency and, um, you know, decibel level, you just go running, right? Like, have you ever been in your house maybe, and you hear somebody yell out cause they fell or something in your, whatever you're doing, you just stop and you run and you, and you figure out what happened. So it's like stimulus driven by this distress and need and vulnerability and urgency. And so I think that people generally don't respond in situations that don't have these in evolution, they come releasers.
00:18:10
Speaker
they're almost like, you know, if the chicken is sitting on the egg and the egg rolls away, then it retrieves the egg and brings it back to the nest. And they can do all these experiments to show like there's releasers in the stimulus, like the shape of the egg and the way it's
Influence of the Bystander Effect
00:18:25
Speaker
rolling, just automatically kind of release this behavior and say a bird sitting on an egg. But I, so I think it's similar a little bit in this retrieval mechanism that it's stimulus driven. And so the context,
00:18:39
Speaker
is going to determine whether or not the stimuli match this kind of prototype in your psyche of this urgent distress and need. And so I do think that's really important. And the bystander effect is real. It's for sure real, but I think social psychology has emphasized it to a point of distraction, right? Like we know people don't help is all the message, the take home message people are getting is like people don't help in emergencies. And it's like, well, that's not actually true. People do.
00:19:09
Speaker
it's just influenced by other people being around. And that's part of that calculus, right? Like your brain is calculating, can I respond in time successfully? And your brain's also calculating like, well, the risk to me is, you know, divided by the probability that somebody else here could do a better job, right? So like, I shouldn't be the one that jumps in if the person standing next to me is a better swimmer or is a doctor or, you know,
00:19:36
Speaker
a trained firefighter, like I need to let them do the job because the probability is higher of success and I shouldn't, you know, waste my effort. And it's also like people just get embarrassed doing things around other people and they put themselves into like a, you know, embarrassing or vulnerable situation by being the one that acts in front of other people. So I do think that's a real thing, the bystander effect, but I do think once you,
00:20:04
Speaker
put all these releasing cues into the situation and the person's competent and capable, they will basically respond. You can predict when people are going to respond that is fairly situationally driven.
00:20:19
Speaker
That show sounds terrifying. It is terrifying. It's totally terrifying. In psychology, you know, but maybe not all the listeners know that's like the prime example of when psychology went awry and lost their ethical responsibility toward the people that they were enrolling in their studies because once you go home, you can't unring the bell, right?
00:20:44
Speaker
I come up, I do this show and it turns out I was willing to kill somebody and then I go home and now I'm a killer, you know, like you can't unring this bell like learning something about myself that probably never would have happened and might happen to everyone, but I don't know that because only I was in the study and now.
00:21:02
Speaker
You know, like my self image is just destroyed. Yep, yep, that's that's a lot how I felt. Yeah, I mean, thinking again about the a little bit more about the bystander effect, I found it very interesting in the in the paper, Stephanie, how you describe the situations and the factors that kind of go into.
00:21:22
Speaker
when the bystander effect takes place and when it doesn't. One of the things that I thought was most interesting there was really about the informational components in the situation. So a lot of times, especially in a public setting, you have imperfect information. So maybe if you understood the situation completely and understood how you could help, you would be more likely to help. But oftentimes,
00:21:46
Speaker
you don't have that information and that can be an impact on maybe why you don't help out. Yeah, I think uncertainty is maybe the biggest factor in risk aversion, right? So when we are worried about acting and we're not sure we should act and we avoid acting, it's because we're not sure. We're not sure what the situation is. We're not sure how fast the water is rushing or how cold it is or
00:22:14
Speaker
how strong we are, and we're not sure if we're gonna be the best person to help. And in the bystander effect, they often study medical type emergencies, like say I just fall to the ground in pain, but like you don't know what's wrong with me, right? And I do think people also have the protective mechanisms. They study in evolutionary psychology, like my colleague Josh Ackerman studies disease avoidance. So like somebody is laying
00:22:43
Speaker
unconscious on the ground or something, nobody wants to catch a contagious illness or interface with somebody who could be just faking in order to rob you, right? Like there's all this uncertainty about what's happening in strangers and in medical emergencies and
00:23:00
Speaker
People even are scared they're going to get sued if they intervene and they do the wrong thing. You move somebody and now their neck is broken. It's all your fault. So people have so much fear and uncertainty in these emergency situations. And those, I think, are really potent preventers of action. Uncertainty in a financial market and in a medical emergency are similarly preventative of action, I think.
00:23:27
Speaker
That's a really interesting point, too, because you think about deciding whether or not you're going to take a pretty substantial action, and even with no distraction whatsoever, where it seems fairly clear what your action is going to be and what the effect of it would be, that's a difficult choice to make. You still have to stop and think about it for a second.
00:23:47
Speaker
you know, put in a whole crowd of people around you who are, you also have to sort of calculate what are they thinking. You know, what is this, how can I read this entire situation correctly? The cognitive overload seems like it would be pretty substantial too. And there's a lot of uncertainty.
00:24:03
Speaker
in that component you're talking about too, because I don't know if you're a medical doctor. I don't know if you're just about to respond. And so I don't have to write. It's kind of like the game of chicken where once one person starts to move, then everybody is, um, at ease because they know they're off the hook. And so there's a lot of uncertainty because you can't quite calculate the probability that another person is going to act and you really are on the hook or not. And most people say,
00:24:33
Speaker
If I was the only person there, you know, you would just feel like you had to do something unless you thought
00:24:40
Speaker
you know, for sure it would kill you. You feel like if you're the only person there and you're witnessing this terrible thing, you have to do something to help. But like, I think people underestimate the rational fear in all of this. Like one of the most famous bystander apathy cases is Kitty Genovese. Do you hear about it? Yeah. Yeah. And they have a movie about it. I think it's called Witness. It's a really interesting case that a woman was murdered outside her apartment building.
00:25:07
Speaker
And they claimed that, you know, 38 people or something heard her scream and nobody did anything. And there's all this new stuff about how, well, it wasn't quite the case. Some people did call the police and there wasn't 38 people. There was only 16 or, you know, something like that.
00:25:22
Speaker
but it's like, well, come on, give me a break. Like somebody's being murdered, you know, with a deadly weapon in a dark alley. Most of us aren't rushing toward a situation like that, right? Like, you know, it's, it's a lot to ask of somebody to rush toward like a dangerous lunatic with a knife who's already willing to kill somebody, you know, and calling the police. That's one thing, you know, for sure. Everyone needs to call the police, but,
00:25:49
Speaker
You know, using it as a case of what a lame society we are that we're not rushing to help this person isn't quite fair, right? It's not quite a fair assessment. And I think that happens a lot in public situations. People are fearful for what might happen to them and it's reasonable. You know, you got to assume it's reasonable. Your brain is making this like rational intuitive calculation that I think takes this risk into account.
00:26:16
Speaker
Yeah, and also on the other side, how much help could I possibly provide? The risk is great, and what exactly is the reward that I can provide for this other person? Is there anything I could legitimately do that would change the situation? Right, right. Yeah, and I think helplessness is one thing that they often refer to as a reason people don't act. You just feel like, I don't know what I could do. I don't think I could make a difference.
00:26:46
Speaker
There's this one feature in altruism called the single victim effect, or sometimes I call it entity tivity, which is like the worst word ever. No, that's a great. What did I say entity tivity? It's just refers to this fact that you are being more likely to help a single victim than many victims. So it's in a way considered irrational, right? Because if you can help lots of people, why wouldn't you? Like, why would you prefer to help fewer people?
00:27:16
Speaker
Um, but I think for one, if you have this offspring care mechanism, the prototype is of a single individual who's distressed and in need. Right. But also the helplessness really seeps in when you see, Oh, well this entire nation of people is being oppressed. Give your donations and people are like, Oh, I don't know. What could we do about that? Right. And people feel helpless in the scope of the problem.
00:27:43
Speaker
and that definitely limits your motivation to do something. I think this might be a great place to take a break and we can come back and talk some more about the topic.
Case Study: Wesley Autry
00:28:24
Speaker
We wanted to talk a little bit about some more specific examples of heroism and maybe some of the factors that might have led to successful acts of heroism versus situations where maybe people wouldn't have been so successful or wouldn't act in a heroic manner. Well, um, in the literature that I'm a part of where people are writing about heroism and altruism, a case that often comes up is there's a guy named Wesley Autry,
00:28:52
Speaker
who jumped onto a subway track to save a boy who had fallen in. He wasn't a young boy. He was like around 16 or 17, I think. And he had had a seizure. And then right after the seizure, he was disoriented and fell into the subway track. And the train was actually coming. So time was of the essence. It was a dangerous situation. And Wesley Autry was standing there with his two daughters
00:29:18
Speaker
and jumped in and there was no time to lift him up and pull him out before the train. So he laid on top of him in the middle of the train tracks while the train went over both of them, you know, like preventing them from being decapitated by like inches. So that's like a really interesting case because it's an awesome act and most of us wouldn't undertake that, right?
00:29:42
Speaker
And I think there's various features of the situation. We talked about situational dependency that are relevant here. The fact that the person was young and had a seizure, I think,
00:29:53
Speaker
you know, lends itself to the vulnerability of the person. That person is in a situation where they can't help themselves. Usually, we don't want to help people who, well, why don't you just do that yourself? Like, why don't you just get out of the situation? Why aren't you working harder, right? When you can assume the other person is able to help themselves, people generally aren't very motivated to act. But in a case where somebody's just had a seizure and everybody on the platform witnessed it,
00:30:19
Speaker
then you know, neurologically, he's not in his right mind in this moment, and he's young, he's vulnerable. And so that's like a situational cue that triggers people's wanting to help. But the average person is still not quite jumping in because the train's coming, right? So your calculus is, this is gonna be too risky. But the helper Wesley said that he actually thought his decision was benefited by the fact that he had worked in a union
00:30:47
Speaker
where they had to do a lot of work in small, confined spaces. It was almost like he had expertise in making the calculation about where his body could fit and that he could survive if the train went over them, if they laid in the right spot in the right position. And so that is an interesting feature of the potential expertise.
00:31:10
Speaker
And I think it's sort of one of those not for nothing variables that he was also a father, you know, with his two and you said his two daughters were there with him were with him. Yeah. So in a way, you might say, oh, what kind of terrible person would let like leap into potential death right in front of their children? They'd be scarred for life and they have a father. Right. But I think being a father also helps ensure that he's sensitive to this vulnerability and need of younger people.
00:31:39
Speaker
You know, his hormones have been changed by the experience of fatherhood. There's a lot of research showing that. So I think that's an interesting case because it includes many of these features that we assume are sort of situational drivers, the expertise, the vulnerability, the neoteny, where it's like a youth or a baby, a young person. And we find in our own research that the people being young or babies or children,
00:32:05
Speaker
is a very strong driver of people's willingness to donate money to charities. Yeah, I think that's a great example. It really pulls out a lot of the factors that influence whether someone's going to act in that heroic way. So in the end of that story, though, everyone was OK. They got out OK. Everybody was, wow, that's amazing.
00:32:26
Speaker
Yeah, that's something that I remember hearing that story at one point, the fact that he has some expertise with confined spaces and didn't just do this on complete impulse, he maybe had some sense of what was going on. That makes me feel better about the fact that I might not have done it.
00:32:48
Speaker
No, you don't have to feel guilty. Right. I mean, yeah, exactly. I mean, I don't think I would have done that either. And I think, yeah, for exactly the fact that there's almost no possibility that if I had taken such an action that either one of us would have survived kind of factors into that. It's actually like a surprisingly common situation.
00:33:09
Speaker
people falling into subway tracks. So for my class, I teach a class on altruism, and we Google YouTube videos as stimuli for class. And there's montages full of people being pulled back from falling into a subway track. So in the innocuous case, somebody's just not paying attention, and they're walking toward the track by mistake, or they're about to fall over just for some silly reason, and somebody grabs them, a stranger grabs them and pulls them back,
00:33:39
Speaker
there's tons of those cases. And there's even a handful of cases where the person is all the way in the track and somebody jumps in and pulls them out. But usually like the train isn't like right upon them in those moments. Um, but it's actually like a pretty, I mean, not common, but let's say like this situation, um, you know, on some regularity. Absolutely. I mean, I'm in Bart, you know, on the Bart,
00:34:05
Speaker
tracks. People are always falling down in there and or jumping down. That situation is a little easier to imagine reaching down to grab someone to pull them out. Yeah and they have those signs at the subway that say like beware of the third rail or something like that and so I have this like great fear from growing up that like I don't know which one is the third rail like
00:34:27
Speaker
I don't know what things I can touch and what I can't and what I'm going to be an instantly electrocuted to death. And so like, I don't think I would jump in because I have this fear and uncertainty and lack of knowledge about like, what's the safe and unsafe parts of this? Well, now, what's that? It was maybe in India, I could be wrong about that. The case of a monkey who brought
00:34:52
Speaker
another monkey that was technically dead over to the third rail and electrocuted him so that it stimulated his heart back to life. Now, I don't know if that's altruism, but that's a big, that's just an example of maybe a smart thing to do and maybe has some knowledge about it. But anyway. I haven't heard of that. That sounds like-
00:35:12
Speaker
Amazing, I'd like to look it up for my class right away. That's unusual also because I feel like there's a possibility that it's a random error. Yeah, I think I thought of that too because a lot of those can be. I mean you catch the camera at the right time and it looks like it looks like they're doing something that's informed and intelligent, but it may have nothing to do with that.
00:35:35
Speaker
They have a lot of cases where you can't quite tell. Is it altruism? Is it not? There's one video we watched in class where a dog is standing on the side of a river and another dog is floating by, perhaps in distress, unable to get out of the current. And the dog in the water has a big stick in its mouth. And then the dog on the shore grabs the stick with his mouth and pulls and pulls until he succeeds in getting the dog out of the water.
00:36:04
Speaker
to safety on the land. But then you have this debate that's inevitable. Did he want to save the dog? Or was he just trying to steal the stick? He just wanted the stick. That's funny. I mean, not sure. But one of the more compelling cases, and it happened two times, at least two times on video, where a boy falls into the great ape compound at a zoo. And in one case, I know it's a gorilla. I think it might be a gorilla in both cases or a chippee in one.
00:36:35
Speaker
The, everyone is terrified, right? And nobody else wants to jump in with, you know, a 300 pound gorilla. And it's a very long fall. So even if you try to jump in, you might injure yourself. And once you're in there, you don't know how you're going to get out. So the humans aren't actually diving into help. They're just like screaming. And, um, the boy is unconscious laying on the ground because of the fall.
00:36:59
Speaker
And the gorilla just approaches and lifts up the boy and carries him over to the door where the caretakers access the compound and the caretaker opens the door to retrieve the boy that he's just calmly holding in his arms the way you would hold a baby that is sleeping and you have to carry it from the car or something.
Animal Heroism and Instinctual Responses
00:37:21
Speaker
And it's really amazing.
00:37:23
Speaker
It doesn't even seem just like an accident, right? Because there's two cases, at least on video, where this has happened. And it does seem like the prototypical case of any mammal who observes a youth, a pup, a baby in distress and need. And so I think those are really cool cases too. Yeah, I think those are some really excellent examples of kind of point out some of the
00:37:50
Speaker
situations where heroism is happening and maybe some of the reasons why. I mean, I really like your model of how this trait of altruism and even extreme altruism can be related to caring for offspring. Do you find a lot of resistance to this model or are people generally pretty receptive to it? What are people saying about it? I mean, I think that there's this general agreement that
00:38:18
Speaker
our capacity to be compassionate or helpful or empathic or altruistic is linked in some way to the parenting need, the parenting instinct. I think there's general agreement in psychology and evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology that those things are related. So I don't think there's too much disagreement about that fact. People just haven't written about it in any great detail. They just sort of
00:38:47
Speaker
you know, it's easy to say offhand and then you have to go and do actual research evidence for this thing that we all already believe. And, um, but also heroism per se, isn't something that people have studied. And so my model is really interested in this, what we call retrieval instinct, the reaching out to grab the person back from danger or to like retrieve the helpless discarded baby or pup or, you know, unconscious victim.
00:39:17
Speaker
So this actual act of retrieval to me is really interesting and tied to this neural circuit that we know a lot about in rodents for how they retrieve pups. I think that's the part where people are like, I don't know, that sounds too specific.
00:39:35
Speaker
It's much safer in science to say something general and allude to something that I haven't nailed down any specifics that you could catch me on. I think actually being very specific about this phenomenon, this behavior of retrieval and its roots in mammals makes people uncomfortable.
00:39:59
Speaker
But when you say that the thing about the retrieval thing it makes me think of all those videos of parents catching babies Nearly falling on their heads so many YouTube videos of amazing catches that that parents You know do with kids just about falling Really? There's a very very distinct very real instinct to reach out and grab in that way. I
00:40:21
Speaker
I think so too and we just saw one of those videos yesterday where the dad is sleeping on the couch with like a toddler sleeping on his chest but the baby is behind him on the couch and it looks like the dad's asleep and the baby starts falling like head first onto the ground and the dad reaches out his arm and catches the baby.
00:40:41
Speaker
mid-air. And you're like, how did the sleeping dad know to catch the baby about to land on his head? So I think it is like a legitimate real part of parenting, this like urge to grab your kid back, you know, and it's happened many times in my own life with my kids where you observe this situation. One interesting time was in a public place in Ann Arbor where we live. One of my kids was running toward the intersection.
00:41:10
Speaker
But they had this behavior where they would run toward the intersection and then jump up and land right before they enter the street and wait. So they wouldn't actually go into the street. But a passerby doesn't know that, right? OK, I recognize that exact behavior too, because I have seen that before too. I don't know. Maybe it's to try and create that panic reaction in a parent. Maybe. Because it sure does. It definitely works.
00:41:40
Speaker
I was habituated to the non-dangerous aspect of this behavior because they had done it so many times without ever going in the street. But then there was like a bar on the corner and there was like a drunk guy, you know, leaning against the bar, smoking a cigarette. He looked completely out of it. And when he saw my kid running toward the intersection, he actually leapt up and grabbed the back of the corner.
00:42:04
Speaker
to like, because he thought, you know, she was about to go out in front of a car. And it was like, amazing. It was like the coolest thing ever, right? Because it's like a total stranger and a total stranger who you've completely written off as, you know, contributing to our collective interest in this situation. But, you know, he was like a hero in that moment. You know, I thought, you know, it's really cool. That's really cool. That's a great one. That is a good one. Yeah.
00:42:30
Speaker
Well, I mean, I think in the last minutes here of the interview, it would be really cool to hear Stephanie a bit from you about more broadly your takes on the field of evolutionary psychology and some of the other things that you think are really cool that are going on now and what you think some of the trends
Critique of Evolutionary Psychology
00:42:47
Speaker
are.
00:42:47
Speaker
Yeah, and I think just to sort of add to that, I think this is a really interesting topic, how people think about evolutionary psychology in general. I think you have a more sophisticated view than most, probably most researchers even. And I like the fact that you're tying this to a very, you're tying
00:43:05
Speaker
heroism and putting yourself out there by trying it to a particular display and making this connection directly instead of just making a story about how it could have happened, which I think is sometimes what happens in evolutionary psychology or that's the perception of it. How do you do good evolutionary psychology? Well, I mean, I think you're exactly right. There's a stereotype in the field that evolutionary psychology is
00:43:33
Speaker
unfalsifiable right like that you can just make up a story they call them just so stories and say well this is adaptive because blah blah blah but it's like well how can I prove you wrong how can I prove you right like what what evidence are we going to use to prove that this is or isn't the case and I wasn't trained in evolutionary psychology per se I was trained more in evolutionary biology so
00:43:58
Speaker
you know, and comparative psychology. So you're thinking about, well, how did these things evolve, not just in human evolution? So most evolutionary psychology is worried about the Pleistocene, right? Like when we were hunter-gatherers wearing loincloths in our early, you know, period, what were we doing? And you get the paleo diet and all that kind of stuff. Exactly, exactly. And in this, you know, caricature, the women pick berries and the men hunt and
00:44:27
Speaker
That's why we have sex differences. And it turns out the evidence for all of this is actually like almost non-existent, right? And so evolutionary psychology does get a bad rap. And I particularly dislike forms of evolutionary psychology that propose modules in neural evidence to say we have a part of our brain devoted to this topic, right?
00:44:55
Speaker
That's not really accurate. That's not the way the brain is designed. It usually doesn't locate one single phenomenon in one part of the brain, right? So like a literal module as a single location that's dedicated to some adaptive act doesn't cohere with everything we know about the distributed nature of the brain and how it's capable of doing so many different things with these overlapping circuits.
00:45:21
Speaker
So what I'm interested in, you hear, you hear this so much on popular psychology or popular neuroscience, right? Like people will go on these shows and they'll talk about the amygdala is the part of the brain that does, you know, anything like finish that sentence with literally anything or the frontal cortex. People will talk about like the empathy circuit or the altruism circuit. And you're like, well, I mean, you're misleading people, right? Because this is,
00:45:46
Speaker
the same circuit that's in charge of my drive to seek out chocolate at 9 p.m. or my drive to find really cool, shiny products to wear. It's just an emotionally driven decision circuit that produces motivation. That's for all types of things. It's not just for empathy or for altruism. So I reject this notion of an area, but also
00:46:15
Speaker
There's a little bit to me of a sexist approach in some evolutionary psychology where the just so story for almost every behavior is because it is attractive to males, right? Like everything we do is to attract mates. I'm confident that there is a lot that we do to attract mates, right? But it doesn't have to be everything or it doesn't have to be the only thing that's adaptive.
00:46:42
Speaker
If you can find these behaviors and other species and other contexts separate from mating, then, you know, you need to do your homework and figure out like, is that really the only context where this is relevant? Like one example that comes to mind is there's a paper showing that women buy expensive luxury products because it's proof that their man cares about them.
00:47:07
Speaker
Yeah, those sorts of explanations, it does seem as though they don't go beyond coming to some point at which seems to make sense. Right. And they did collect data that seemed to support their view that, you know, if I have some beautiful diamond ring, then my husband must really care about me. So don't try and steal him because he's already devoted to me. Right.
00:47:33
Speaker
something that might be going on. But if you think about luxury products that women or men buy, in my view, a man can't tell the difference between like Louboutin shoes and Keens, you know, like they don't know what brand your shoes are. They don't know that this purse costs $10,000 and this one costs
00:47:52
Speaker
$39.99 at TJ Maxx. Most people aren't super discriminating about the actual cost of these luxury products, and people in your own gender are much more likely to know the true value, the signal that you're sending when you buy that purse that has the premium cost attached to it. I'm just wondering, well, maybe females are also competing with one another. Maybe there's a female hierarchy that doesn't have anything to do with
00:48:22
Speaker
the immediate need to impress men or to save their man. So I just think the field could benefit from more perspectives or considering more alternatives and being more tied to knowledge about evolution in the brain in biology or in neuroscience.
00:48:44
Speaker
I love to use information that we know about the brain from all different species, right? Because the brain itself is like a constrained mechanism and you can't just add whatever you want to it, right? Like it already has these constraints and the mammalian brain has been evolving for 200 million years, long, long, long before, you know, we were beating people over the heads with clubs in the Pleistocene, you know, we had a brain that had,
00:49:11
Speaker
an amygdala and it had this emotion based decision system and it was capable of taking care of offspring. So there's these features in our brains that have been around for a really long time and are visible in other species besides humans. And I think, you know, you get the most bang for your buck from investigating that because there's so much data on brain systems and other animals way more than we have for humans. And there's,
00:49:40
Speaker
you know, great comparative evidence from all these species that evolved common traits that presumably have some common origin. So that's how I like to do the science because you just can take advantage of all of this existing data that nobody's really bothering to apply to these interesting cases.
Cross-Species Study for Human Behavior
00:50:00
Speaker
Yeah, that is such a, that to me is such a more satisfying way to approach and collect data. Yeah, no, I think it's really great. And I think, Stephanie, that your approach to this is really cool in the sense of just, it really feels like you're taking a really big picture view on the field and wanting to push it in some interesting new directions, which I think is awesome. One of the, I mean, there's this huge respect for evolution as something that's as
00:50:29
Speaker
something that can explain any behavior is the ultimate source of explanation and in a way it has to be. It's sometimes really difficult because you can't observe any of the processes that have led to a particular kind of behavior. You know that it was evolution, but you don't know exactly what sort of pressures may have caused it. In some sense, it's got to be a kind of speculation. I guess the reason why your approach seems more satisfying to me and
00:50:59
Speaker
probably to most people is because you can collect evidence that seems more likely about brains that are similar to ours as they're happening and see all of this conservation of behavior and conservation of brain pathways across species. It's rather than thinking about it as just something that evolved within humans. Yeah. And that's super important to me because all of my research basically is grounded on this idea that humans think they're special and they think that they
00:51:28
Speaker
you know, cogitate and think and examine and imagine everything that they do, right? Like all of my decisions are based on, you know, highly deliberated decisions that I've made because I'm an advanced human. Like that's a little bit of a caricature of how people think these advanced behaviors exist. And so if you can show that a rat can do the same thing, a monkey can do the same thing, a bird can do the same thing,
00:51:58
Speaker
Are you sure that this is special to humans? Are you sure this is something that requires intense cognition? So I think it's important to point out when we have behaviors that were shaped by evolution to be rational, but not to require explicit reasoning. So I think my work in empathy and altruism and heroism and emotion-based decisions all emphasizes that attribute that I think is
00:52:25
Speaker
overstated in the literature, the special cognitive capacities of humans. Are there other animals that you can cite as examples that you might see of heroic kinds of behaviors? Because I really like the examples of rats performing these pretty analogous heroic behaviors. Are there any other animals that seem to do this and you can point to as probably having hardwired mechanisms to do this? Well, there are a lot of cases that are
00:52:53
Speaker
similar to the dog with the stick, right? Like they look pretty heroic, but it's difficult with these rare acts to be sure that they really were heroic acts and not accidents or something like that. Or they had bad intent that we appraised positively. Like there's a lot of examples in dolphins of rescuing individuals or other species that appear to be drowning
00:53:19
Speaker
killer whales that will prop up people that they see who appear to be drowning and bring them to the shore or to a boat. There's cases where monkeys and apes are, especially with apes, there's examples of saving another ape or a bird or a person from danger. And I think there's birds that like rescue eggs that are falling out of nests and
00:53:48
Speaker
There's even one of the coolest cases with ants. So they have these experiments where an ant is trapped under a string that the experimenter has set up. And the other ants will come by and spend a long time kind of problem solving and trying to free the other ant. And they eventually do. So they have this retrieval behavior in ants, just like in people.
00:54:13
Speaker
That's funny. And that's the only that would be the only example where you've got where you've got young that don't take a long time to raise and you're not. It wouldn't come from the investment in raising young. Yeah, it does seem like it could have a different mechanism, but it would benefit from this collective group need that we talked about at the very beginning. Right. But also they probably are a little bit interrelated genetically. But also part of the mechanism isn't distinct because they think what
00:54:41
Speaker
sets off the observing ant to help is this contagious stress hormone, which is what we also observe in people, that we catch the distress of others, we catch the stress of others, we even have cortisol responses that can go up in response to another person's stress. So this is part of what motivates us to act, which does seem to be similar to what happens in the ants. That is amazing that there may be something that's conserved between ants and us.
00:55:12
Speaker
That's a long distance. Right. It doesn't have to evolve from the common ancestor, right? It could just be like a really simple, smart, effective way of allowing the state of one individual to affect another. And it can arise spontaneously in distinct species. But it does seem to be a similar mechanism. Well, I think this might be a good place to wrap up the show.
Conclusion and Gratitude
00:55:37
Speaker
I think it's been a really good conversation.
00:55:40
Speaker
I'm convinced that we could be heroes too. Thank you. Thank you so much, Stephanie, for being on the show. I think this is a great conversation. Really enjoyed hearing about your research and some of your thoughts on this stuff. Thank you so much for your interest. It was fun to be here.