How selfish are we really? - Jo Brand, Matti Wilks and Steve Jones

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Speaker 12 Now, today we're discussing the science of altruism, a concept first explored in detail by the French philosopher Augustus Comte.

Speaker 1 Scientifically, not only was Comte actually a philosopher, he was also a cheese maker.

Speaker 1 And though that might not sound that it is linked, but everyone here who is sat around a cheese board will know that towards the end of the evening, it can get harder and harder to take a smaller and smaller piece of cheese, never wanting to take the very, very final bit.

Speaker 1 And you will actually see through altruism that, for instance, if you're sat around at a family party, very often if there's two children there and they're children of your own, you will allow them to have half the gouda.

Speaker 1 Whereas, if you then have, say, cousins around you, you will often find that you would only share a certain amount of, say, the bour saint with them.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 12 if there's Comte, it's Comte, it's got an accent on the E.

Speaker 12 It's different. That's a region of France close to Switzerland.
Comte doesn't have an accent on the E.

Speaker 1 It's got nothing to do with it at all. So

Speaker 1 he wasn't a cheesemaker.

Speaker 1 Okay, just ignore everything I said then.

Speaker 1 Though I would like to make it clear from an altruistic point of view that if ever there is Wensleydale and cranberry cheese, then just have it.

Speaker 1 It shows no generosity of spirit to give them that foul Wensleydale.

Speaker 10 Today, we're looking at altruism.

Speaker 1 And cheese.

Speaker 12 What is altruism? Is there really such a thing, or is it just a product of our selfish genes? Is helping others a uniquely human trait, or do we see altruistic behavior in other animals?

Speaker 1 Do you know what? It's such a pity it's not cheese and philosophy. You know that bit when you throw a possible pun in the room and then all I could see was, ah, Cameron Bertrand Russell.

Speaker 1 And then followed immediately. Unfortunately, the philosophical cheeseman was destroyed in the postmodern years by Foucaolai.
Anyway, so there we go. That's Torres.

Speaker 12 I love that, the Philosophical Cheeseman.

Speaker 1 It's a great name for probably a Wurzel's tribute band that play the North Somerset area.

Speaker 1 Anyway, to help us understand kindness, we're joined by a social psychologist, a snail biologist, and a gingerbread gastronomist. And they are.

Speaker 10 Steve Jones. I'm Professor of Genetics at University College London, and I've been there for 50 years, which is about the only high point in my career.

Speaker 10 And my favourite altruistic act was done by the University of Edinburgh, strangely, many years ago, because as a Welshman living in Liverpool, I wanted to go back to Wales, the obvious place where a Welshman would be happy.

Speaker 10 All the Welsh universities turned me down. And I have to say, since then, they all, all four of them, have given me honorary degrees.
I always make a point of saying this in a very marked manner.

Speaker 10 When I wanted a real degree, you didn't give it to me. And I mouth the words, you bastards.

Speaker 1 There's nothing altruistic about that. Anyway,

Speaker 11 hi, I'm Maddie Wilkes. I'm a lecturer in psychology at the University of Edinburgh.

Speaker 11 I study a whole range of things related to morality, how we morally value different beings, what our moral circles look like, things like that.

Speaker 11 And thinking about one of the nicest altruistic things that someone has done for me, I was once on holiday in Japan with my mom and we were trying to find our Airbnb.

Speaker 11 And for those who don't know, Japan has blocks rather than streets, so you don't have street names and numbers. We were very, very lost walking around trying to find where we had to go.

Speaker 11 And this random man on the street saw us and came over and I don't speak any Japanese and he didn't speak any English, but he took time out of his day not just to tell us where to go but to walk us the entire way to our apartment and to the front front door.

Speaker 11 And it just really stuck with me that he didn't have to do that, and it really made our holiday a lot better. And he also didn't come back later and murder us, which was also very nice.

Speaker 13 Hello, I'm Joe Brand. The most altruistic thing someone's ever done for me was millions of years ago, me and my mate Andy went hitching around France.
Don't do that, kids.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 13 we were picked up by this lovely guy who's a doctor, and he drove us about 80 miles a long way. And when we got out of the car, we realized we'd left our passports on the roadside where

Speaker 13 he'd picked us up. And he drove us all the way back, and it took a couple of hours.
And then he took us out as well for a drink.

Speaker 13 I feel really bad that I nicked his wallet.

Speaker 1 And this is our panel.

Speaker 1 What is altruism? How do we define it?

Speaker 11 So psychology actually has done a really bad job of defining things like altruism and morality. There's a lot of different definitions that float around.

Speaker 11 I think personally, a helpful way to think about it is an act that's kind or compassionate towards somebody else for which you don't expect anything in return.

Speaker 11 And it's usually something that's quite costly as well.

Speaker 1 So what would be, if you just give us a classic like kind of day-to-day moment, obviously earlier on you mentioned that one of the altruistic acts is not to kill people.

Speaker 1 But what would be a typical thing that perhaps quite a few people in this audience now today might have experienced in the last week?

Speaker 11 So I think if you see somebody on the street that's asking for money or needs help, going up and being able to help them or just something as simple as holding the door for somebody or helping them find their apartment when they're lost in a foreign city.

Speaker 11 So small things like that are kind of more everyday kinds of altruism that we see.

Speaker 12 And Steve, how would you define altruism?

Speaker 10 As an evolutionary biologist, I say reducing your own fitness, in other words, reducing your ability to pass on your own genes to increase the ability of somebody else doing that.

Speaker 10 And that seems a slightly anti-evolution point of view to take, because Darwin would never really have thought of that. Evolution was all about increasing your own fitness, not helping somebody else.

Speaker 10 But there are conditions where it can happen. There are some famous cases where it has actually happened.

Speaker 10 On Scott's last expedition, typically British failure, badly prepared, short of money, came second in a race of two

Speaker 10 and because Amundsen got to the South Pole first. They turned round and came back, and they had horses with them.
And they refused to kill the horses because they were horses. You don't kill horses.

Speaker 10 So that slowed them down. And they starved to death because they didn't shoot the horses and eat them.

Speaker 1 Now, I suppose we should ask that now the horses were just left with a load of dead human beings around them. Did the horses live?

Speaker 10 One got back very strangely because all the explorers died only 11 miles away from where the rescue party was. And the rescue party came to try and find them and found their bodies.

Speaker 10 And they also found the sledge, which they dragged all the way from the South Pole, loaded with rocks. And those rocks are actually now in the National History Museum.
You can see them.

Speaker 10 They're just rocks.

Speaker 10 But they were the first hint of continental drift and the breakup of continents. So Captain Scott actually discovered continental drift, so it was worth doing, worth dying for, I would say.

Speaker 12 I should ask you, Joe, for your definition, given that we're.

Speaker 1 Before that, I want to know: would you eat a horse for your own survival?

Speaker 13 And often have.

Speaker 13 Would I? Yeah,

Speaker 13 if it was for survival, yeah, I wouldn't know how to cook it, though.

Speaker 13 What do I think altruism is? Doing something nice for someone without expecting anything back except a very small amount of money.

Speaker 12 Steve, so if we go back, let's say, to the Neanderthals, or I don't know, Homo erectus or Australopithecus aferenzis,

Speaker 12 when do we start to see evidence that there's a I suppose you could call it collaboration, I suppose, in a sense, rather than just this pure biological drive?

Speaker 10 You see collaboration, I mean the oldest,

Speaker 10 some of the oldest Neanderthals known are in Siberia. And now that you can look at DNA, it turns out that lots of those Neanderthal gangs, and we're going back a long way now, they were family groups.

Speaker 10 So there was kind of kin selection. They'd stayed together as an extended family, often with two or three generations and maybe 30 or 40 people in the gang.

Speaker 10 So that was collaboration of a sense and keeps them alive. That's collaboration with genetics.
And you can see how that works because it makes you fit.

Speaker 10 Why you should collaborate in other ways is less clear. But I often think of getting on a number 29 bus which is filled with chimps.
Okay.

Speaker 10 I often get on the number 29 bus and it is filled with chimps,

Speaker 10 at least metaphorically speaking, particularly after 11 at night. And of course, that wouldn't work at all because the chimps would fight to literally fight to the death.

Speaker 10 So, what we've managed to do is to hide our chimp-like ancestry largely by losing most of the genes and different genetic differences that chimps have.

Speaker 10 Homo sapiens, the species to which many of us claim to belong,

Speaker 10 is the most uniform mammal of all. We are more similar across the world than any other mammal.
And of course, we are

Speaker 10 by far the most abundant large mammal. And I think that's not a coincidence because gorillas and chips fight each other if they come into conflict and they often kill each other.

Speaker 10 We don't do that until we invented atom bombs, but we can still regard ourselves as remarkable, extremely abundant, and yet remarkably less quarrelsome than any other mammal.

Speaker 1 We should say, by the way, this is entirely true, that also Steve does live very, very near to London Zoo. So there is a high percentage chance that you've not been getting on the right bus.

Speaker 1 Excuse me, this is the London

Speaker 1 transport system. I don't care.

Speaker 13 Can I just say, I don't think Robbie Williams has done very well hiding his chimp ancestry, has he?

Speaker 12 Mattia, so Steve described, I suppose you could see how altruism could begin in smaller groups and then you move to wider groups.

Speaker 12 So, in terms of your studies of altruism today in our societies, can you begin to explore it in terms of group size?

Speaker 12 So, it's clearly something that we would expect, I suppose, within a very close-knit community of family and so on. And then how does it change as it spreads out to a larger group?

Speaker 11 This is a really fascinating question and I don't think it's one that we've done a particularly good job of answering.

Speaker 11 A lot of the work that we do on altruism and on morality and moral judgments is sort of done in labs and in these sort of small scale environments.

Speaker 11 And if you think about altruism, there's this concept of reciprocal altruism. So you're altruistic with the assumption that at some point in the future that person will reciprocate.

Speaker 11 And so this is sort of an explanation that could try to explain why altruism would have evolved in some cases.

Speaker 11 But a lot of the work that we do is in these kind of small-scale studies where we're looking at altruistic behavior among our close others.

Speaker 11 And what our research shows is that if we look at things like group biases, we're much more likely to be altruistic to people who are similar to us or who are close to us in all of these different ways.

Speaker 11 So, we do know that there's a little bit of work coming out now on this group which are termed sort of extraordinary altruists, and these are people who are particularly altruistic to complete strangers, so to people that they'll never meet or never engage with.

Speaker 11 So, as an example, we were talking earlier about people who make altruistic or non-directed kidney donations.

Speaker 11 So, these are people who donate a kidney to a complete stranger, they don't have any particular person in mind.

Speaker 11 And I think psychology has done a really bad job so far of explaining why we would do that, so why we would be altruistic in these kind of larger-scale societies when altruism seems to be kind of underpinned by either familial closeness or this expectation of reciprocity.

Speaker 12 From an evolutionary perspective, though, are we really saying that it would have begun

Speaker 12 as a cooperation

Speaker 12 in small groups, probably family groups? And you can see why that would be advantageous.

Speaker 10 Yes, I think yeah, but of course we have plenty of altruism which is not related to that at all.

Speaker 10 I mean there is stuff called reciprocal altruism and chimps have reciprocal altruism because if one chimp is infected with

Speaker 10 insects, with lice say, it'll pick off the insects of another chimp which will return compliment. So that you balance it out.
It doesn't have to be reciprocal altruism.

Speaker 10 We wouldn't have civilization, it would be impossible, without pure altruism. It just couldn't survive.
And in some senses, the ability to speak is

Speaker 10 central to that fact, because it's very easy to sense somebody's attitude towards you or towards somebody else from what they say.

Speaker 10 It's much more difficult by looking at the expression on their face, unless they're sweating with rage.

Speaker 10 So

Speaker 10 that's what speech does. It cuts down the tension.
That's why everybody in the audience audience is slowly nodding off eating as I speak.

Speaker 1 But that's interesting. Matthew, I was just wondering that because collaboration came up there.
So what is that murky line between what we might describe as collaboration and altruism?

Speaker 1 Collaboration immediately is saying we're all working together, we're building this together.

Speaker 1 Whereas altruism seems to have, at the very least, a possible delay, or as you were saying, no reward whatsoever, or at least overt reward.

Speaker 11 I often get asked, you know, is there such thing as pure altruism or true altruism where there's no self-benefit? And I think it would exist, but it's likely very rare.

Speaker 11 So even if you're doing something that, you know, this person hasn't asked you to do and you're not going to get anything for it, you're still feeling good.

Speaker 11 And so I think it's not as clear to me what pure or true altruism really is. And so then the line.

Speaker 13 Can I just ask, is that so bad, feeling good about doing something nice for you?

Speaker 11 I don't think so. No, I think it's fantastic and it encourages people to do more good.

Speaker 13 Yeah, so but people sort of they use it as an excuse that there's no such thing as an altruistic act act because if it makes you feel good, it's not altruistic.

Speaker 13 But I don't think that's the worst sin in the world, really, is it?

Speaker 1 Feeling good. So I don't think people are, say you are donating a kidney.
If you were doing that, there's not right at the front of your brain going, ha ha ha ha, I've donated a kidney.

Speaker 1 And then when I need some hearts and lungs, they'll give that. You know, that's it's not even in the background, is it?

Speaker 1 It's like however much we might most people doing an altruistic act are, I think, anyway, predominantly just trying to do something nice.

Speaker 13 Apart from the ones on Instagram and TikTok.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Although overcharging for, frankly, used kidneys.

Speaker 13 Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 12 Is this a line we should draw? Because I suppose it's obvious evolutionarily that you could get... So cooperation helps in a group.

Speaker 12 But I suppose altruism, are we defining it precisely as something for which there is no obvious reward other than, as you said, something like happiness, which is a very high level response?

Speaker 10 The problem with altruism is if you cheat, you win, okay?

Speaker 10 And there are all kinds of impenetrable mathematical models about this. You know, if you make an altruistic act and you do brain scans, molecular phrenology, as we call it nowadays,

Speaker 10 and you make it, then the

Speaker 10 part of your brain that lights up when you do a scan is next to the pleasure center. Oh, okay.

Speaker 10 You know, just the feeling you have after you've just drunk a good bottle of wine. See, and if you do an altruistic act, it's much cheaper.

Speaker 12 Matty, are are humans born with? Is altruism part of a child, you know, one-year-old or two-year-old, or does it develop?

Speaker 11 So, very young babies, it's very difficult to do research with, right, because they can't speak, and so it's very hard to ask them, you know, is this the morally right thing to do?

Speaker 11 But there's some work actually from my old post-doc advisor, Paul Bloom, and his collaborators, where they looked at really young children, so six months, three months old, and how they think about pro-social and antisocial behavior of others.

Speaker 11 So, they ran these little experiments where you have one little triangle that is trying to go up a hill, and then you have somebody, one of the triangles comes along and tries to push the other triangle down, and then you have a circle that comes along and tries to push the triangle up.

Speaker 11 So basically, someone that's clearly hindering and somebody that's clearly helping.

Speaker 11 And then they sort of had these really young babies interact with or engage with the hinderer and the helper triangles.

Speaker 11 And what they find is that from around six months, maybe a little earlier, children prefer the helper to the hinderer. So they prefer, they will want to give more rewards to the helper.

Speaker 11 They're more surprised if somebody approaches the hinderer. They want to punish the hinderer.

Speaker 11 So there's a very early emerging sense of awareness of pro-sociality and antisocial behavior, but it's certainly not as evolved as what we see in adults.

Speaker 11 And then as children grow up, they become actually very parochial in some sense. So young children are very group focused, so they prefer in-groups to out-groups and things like that.

Speaker 11 But in some of my own recent work, we find that This isn't as true in certain domains.

Speaker 11 So we find that compared to adults, children actually seem to grant more moral concern concern or express more moral concern for animals, for strangers as compared to family members, and also to people who are really far away, so to distant others.

Speaker 11 So, if you ask about how much obligation we have to help somebody who lives in the same country as you, or how much obligation we have to help someone who lives in another country, adults will say that we have less obligation to help somebody who lives in another country.

Speaker 11 Children say that, but the gap between the person in the close country or a far away country is a lot smaller. Now, this is pretty surprising.

Speaker 11 Most research historically has been that children are very parochial, but we've got a little bit of data that's starting to suggest that maybe it's not to the same degree that we thought.

Speaker 12 Does that suggest that somehow this is deeply embedded in the human psyche? And how are we to interpret that from an evolutionary perspective?

Speaker 10 Well, you can take a straightforward genetical point of view. If you increase the ability of yourself or a relative to reproduce, those genes will spread.

Speaker 10 But I think it's not necessarily quite like that.

Speaker 10 That a reciprocal altruism is really at the front of every religion, as far as I'm aware, and I have to say I was once secularist of the year, so I was obviously no expert on the subject.

Speaker 12 Didn't you also rewrite the Bible?

Speaker 10 I did rewrite the Bible.

Speaker 1 I got it right. Yeah.

Speaker 10 But it was quite uncanny. The structure of the Bible and the structure of the origin of species are remarkably similar.

Speaker 10 They start off with origins and they end up with mysterious stuff which you don't understand. And the only time the word evolve is in the origin of species, it's the very last word in the book.

Speaker 10 So, the idea of evolution, which I often think of as the grammar of biology, genetics is the spelling of biology, but the grammar of putting it all together is evolutionary grammar.

Speaker 10 And so, the theory of evolution has a lot in common with other theories of life in general. It's noticeable that all religions, for example, somewhere have the phrase that means unto others.

Speaker 10 Now, that's what they do unto others, you would have them do unto you. And that's reciprocal altruism.

Speaker 10 Unfortunately, different religions, of course, hate the other religions,

Speaker 10 so that has problems of its own. But the universality, all the way from Buddhism to

Speaker 10 African religions, of this unto others, unto others of your own tribe, at least, is a statement that altruism is at the very base of being human.

Speaker 12 So, are we saying that essentially to live in a group,

Speaker 12 you need something that looks like altruism.

Speaker 12 And I suppose the follow-on question is: does that then extend to other species? You mentioned chimpanzees, but maybe birds, you know, elephants, things that live in groups. Yeah.

Speaker 10 Most things in living groups have some altruistic behaviours. Elephants have a lot of altruistic behaviour.
They care, grandmothers care for grandchildren or grandelephants.

Speaker 10 And the kids never forget it.

Speaker 10 When it comes to altruism, there's a lot of it about.

Speaker 12 Is that link there? Because I suppose you're looking after a family group, you can see. Well, it don't it doesn't.

Speaker 10 Being a family group helps, but it doesn't always work. I mean, you know, there's plenty of families of people who hate each other.

Speaker 10 But I think it's silly to apply the rules that apply to, let's say, fruit flies with altruism.

Speaker 14 Or

Speaker 10 a good example is some insects, when the male is mated with the female, in crickets, for example, it's very altruistic because the female then turns around and eats the male.

Speaker 10 Now that's very generous of the male, but

Speaker 10 it's not doing very much good to his prospects for life, but it is allowing his genes a bigger chance of surviving. So that's kind of...

Speaker 1 Is he being generous? Or is he being slow?

Speaker 13 No, I was just going to say, I've often wondered where the phrase, no good deed ever goes unpunished, comes from. And

Speaker 13 it sounds like it applies there.

Speaker 1 I wonder, Matthew, about the,

Speaker 1 again, going back almost to that definition of altruism and then empathy, for instance, which is, you know, everything that Steve was just talking about there, it seems this is part of what you might call the pattern of nature, but not necessarily the choice.

Speaker 1 I suppose to me, altruism suggests there are various different permutations and that you have to consciously make some form of decision.

Speaker 1 Whereas when we hear about ants, for instance, sacrificing themselves, that seems to be more like the programme of existence.

Speaker 11 So I think that you're right, but I think that it's not maybe as clear out of a line, at least between humans and animals, as we're talking about here.

Speaker 11 So a lot of the time when we're behaving altruistically as people to other people, we're doing so because of our feelings.

Speaker 11 So, you know, because of a drive, and you know, especially if you talk to, for example, heroic rescuers, so people who've gone and saved somebody from a building or a flood or things like that, often they talk about acting from intuition.

Speaker 11 So they just felt like it was the right thing to do. And there's a lot of the way in which we behave pro-socially to others seems to be guided by our intuitions.

Speaker 11 And this is fantastic in many ways, right? It's wonderful that we can empathize with and care for people.

Speaker 11 But the costs of this, of course, are that it's easier to empathize with and care for people who are similar to us.

Speaker 11 And so when we donate money to disaster relief, people often donate more to places that are similar to them.

Speaker 11 So I know we all know about the wildfires and stuff happening at the moment over in California.

Speaker 11 And it seems that, you know, a lot of people are feeling very empathic and very compassionate towards those people and they want to help.

Speaker 11 But we don't necessarily see that happening for people in places that might be a little bit further away either physically or emotionally from us.

Speaker 11 And so I think a lot of our altruism is sort of intuitive and driven.

Speaker 11 But then, there's also we can also make the choice to kind of overcome those biases and say, well, even though these people are different from me or they live far away, we can overcome that and make the decision to behave altruistically and compassionately towards them as well.

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Speaker 13 Has there been any research on whether women are more altruistic than men?

Speaker 11 Would you like to warrant a guess?

Speaker 13 Yeah, I know it's going to be men the way you're looking at me, but is it women?

Speaker 11 So, a lot of the work is around empathy, and in self-reported empathy measures, at least women are consistently much higher than men. Women report being more compassionate.

Speaker 11 So, anything where you have self-report, you see women at much higher rates of compassion and altruism, and this is even from young children. So, actually, it's women.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 1 But that is.

Speaker 13 You're not Robin Ins.

Speaker 1 No, I am fine. You're a nasty piece of work.

Speaker 1 It's not as if I go, oh my god, I've slid down the helter-skelter of being an alpha male all of a sudden.

Speaker 1 But it makes me think about culture as well, you know, because empathy and altruism, there seems to be a crossover there.

Speaker 13 Yeah, but surely I would say the difference is altruism is an action and empathy is an emotion.

Speaker 1 And you do, I think, very often notice more in terms of women in terms of empathy, in terms of broaching and asking people, you know, how they feel.

Speaker 1 And that whole thing seems to widen the possibility of also thinking, well, how can I help you?

Speaker 13 And being nurturers, I suppose, because traditionally

Speaker 13 we women did bring up the kids, didn't they? Long time ago, Steve, didn't they? I know it's not like that so much these days, but that was a tradition, wasn't it?

Speaker 10 And you were a nurse for a long time, weren't you?

Speaker 13 For ten years, yeah.

Speaker 13 But a mental health nurse, so a bit different.

Speaker 13 I didn't have any empathy whatsoever, but you know,

Speaker 1 having worked in mental health and had to deal with some very extreme situations, do you feel there is a level of altruism? That you are, it's not just a job.

Speaker 13 No, it's definitely not just a job.

Speaker 13 But I found that most people that went either into psychiatry or worked as mental health nurses already had some experience of a member of the family or you know a friend or someone they knew having mental health problems.

Speaker 13 I think what that did for them was it enabled them to be more empathetic because they weren't quite so scared. Because I think in the olden days, people were frightened.

Speaker 13 You know, if you remember the sort of pictures that the tabloids used to publish of, what's the name of that boxer? Was it Frank Bruno? Yeah, just making people

Speaker 13 look really scary when, in fact, you know, there was no reason to, apart from to be sensationalist. So I would say, like, my dad had a terrible mental health problem.

Speaker 13 So, in a way, oh god, I'm so simplistic. I kind of feel that I sort of went into that field to try and cheer my dad up in some sort of subconscious way.

Speaker 13 But obviously, as I'm not that intelligent, it might be more sophisticated than that, but I doubt it.

Speaker 13 So, yeah, you know, I think there's interesting reasons people have for doing it, and I think empathy has already started in a way, and they are those sort of people before they do it.

Speaker 13 Ignore Sister Ratchet in one flow of the cuckoo's nest, okay?

Speaker 1 But however, simplistic or not, I don't think you know, that bit of especially if you've watched someone else in pain when you're growing up, it seems to me that that would influence your desire to help other people who might be experiencing the same thing.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I think so. And I think also I'd make a case for there being so many different variables.
Like when you were saying, Matty, about sort of like either donating a kidney or whatever it is,

Speaker 13 If it's someone close to you, you're automatically going to do that. And I think, but if you've done that for someone,

Speaker 13 you know,

Speaker 13 that will kind of pass on, will it not? Sort of like a chain of

Speaker 11 meaning the kidney donation chain?

Speaker 13 Yes, a chain of empathy.

Speaker 11 Yeah, so I think if you know, so a friend of mine actually did this, made a non-directed kidney donation, and I think he did it because he had seen other people doing it.

Speaker 11 And he thought, well, this seems like a really altruistic, kind thing that I can do to extend somebody's life and save somebody's life at what sounds like a huge cost to you, but when you look into the science and the data, there's actually

Speaker 11 minimal health impacts after the surgery and all of that. And so, I think he kind of thought, Well, why wouldn't I do it?

Speaker 11 And that probably wouldn't come about had he not heard about other people who had also done this.

Speaker 12 Matty, from a scientific perspective, you study, let's say, you study society.

Speaker 12 Is there a figure of merit you can attach? Can you say,

Speaker 12 can you measure how altruistic a certain society is? Can you rank them?

Speaker 11 So,

Speaker 11 there's a little bit of work that has done things like this. There's some work on the moral circle.
So, the moral circle basically describes who we do and don't think of as worthy of moral concern.

Speaker 11 So, beings that you do think of as worthy of moral concern go inside your moral circle, and beings that you don't are outside.

Speaker 11 And there's been some work, for example, looking at how expansive different people's moral circles are across all these different societies.

Speaker 11 And you'll have some societies have more expansive moral circles, and some have more contracted.

Speaker 11 Of course, that's only one definition of altruism, so you also might want to look at things like how much people want to share in these kinds of dictator games, things like that.

Speaker 11 And so you do see country-level variance in sort of how altruistic people are. But I think it can be very hard to say whether something is more or less moral or more or less altruistic.

Speaker 11 But you do see quite a lot of variability.

Speaker 12 We tend to assume, don't we, that the more altruistic a society is, the happier it is, the more successful it is. The question is, is that correct, first of all?

Speaker 10 I think there's a classic example which shows that, which is blood donation, okay, and transfusion. Now, in the US, it's expensive.

Speaker 10 Blood donors get paid, they get paid a lot, an awful lot of them are or were, it's better controlled now.

Speaker 10 But for a long time, a lot of them were drug addicts, they had HIV, they had very very, they were various other d diseases.

Speaker 10 But because the transfusion business was a business which made large profits, they just took these people in and hanged the expense.

Speaker 10 Whereas here in Britain, and indeed in much of Europe, it's genuine altruism.

Speaker 10 I'm In many things, I score B plus in many endeavours,

Speaker 10 and B plus is actually my blood group, but blood group B, Rhesus plus.

Speaker 10 Makes me feel very warm, but second rate inside.

Speaker 10 And I used to give blood, I'm too old now, they don't want my bloody blood anymore.

Speaker 10 And the fact that you can expect to get a free, safe blood transfusion in this country and many others, but not in the US and elsewhere where they pay for blood transfusions, is a statement that altruism works better.

Speaker 11 A little bit of work showing that if you did start paying people, I think this might have been done in Australia, if you start paying people for their blood donations, it actually can reduce the amount that they donate because the intrinsic motivation is taken away.

Speaker 11 And so, coming back to this idea of pure altruism, what we were talking about earlier, sometimes having things like the financial incentive can demotivate people to behave altruistically.

Speaker 11 One of the study that I mentioned earlier, one of the things that predicted being morally expensive between countries was having, it's not GDP or finance, but it's having sort of trust in society and high belief in the fabric of society and kind of feeling supported and cared for by other members of society.

Speaker 11 And so it's not as pure of a metric as like the amount of money in terms of success, but it certainly seems like people who are in these kind of high-trust societies where they feel supported are going to behave more altruistically or they're going to be more morally expensive.

Speaker 12 Well, I suppose what I'm trying to get to is play devil's advocate and say, is it necessarily the case that the more altruistic a society is, the better the society is? Is this

Speaker 1 making that you've earned so much you might start dodging your tax?

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 12 is there any research into that?

Speaker 10 I mean, I think yes. I mean, the countries with the highest life expectancy and the lowest infant mortality,

Speaker 10 most of all the Scandinavian countries,

Speaker 10 much of Europe, and then

Speaker 10 small parts of Africa, which are single tribes. I spent some time in Botswana.
I remember when I got to Botswana, I landed in South Africa, which is still

Speaker 10 during the days of apartheid. And I got to the Botswana border, and the chap stopped me and put me past me and he said, Is this the first time you have been to Botswana, sir?

Speaker 10 And I said, Oh yeah, it is. He said, Do not worry, sir.
This is the Hampstead of Africa.

Speaker 10 And he was dead right. It was the Hampstead of Africa.
It was a single tribe, the Setswana, nearly all Setswana. And they had a good health service.

Speaker 10 I I was working in university, a very good education service.

Speaker 10 So you can, altruistic societies work.

Speaker 10 And I think that's really basically a simple observation. And it's generally true.

Speaker 13 I'd quite like to know which is the most altruistic country in the world, then?

Speaker 10 Well, the answer is.

Speaker 1 Are you going to make one up?

Speaker 10 The answer is, I don't know. I mean, my guess would be somewhere like, I think Norway is probably just about as altruistic as you get.
But you see, that's it. B, go to Norway.

Speaker 10 There's nothing else to do apart from being altruistic.

Speaker 10 You certainly can't afford to get drunk, that's a bloody shit.

Speaker 12 Automatic, from your research, if you were to make recommendations

Speaker 12 for how society can better function in this respect, what would those recommendations be?

Speaker 11 So, I guess, can I just preface this by saying it's actually really hard to get people to be altruistic. There's a lot of work into this, and it's really, really challenging.

Speaker 11 And it seems like some of the biggest barriers are, especially in developmental work with kids, cost. So, once something is so, for example, young children, if you bring them into

Speaker 11 an experiment and you say, you know, there's a child coming into the museum later who won't get any stickers and you've given them some stickers, would you like to share?

Speaker 11 Children from about four years of age say that they should share their stickers equally, but it's not until about eight years that children will actually do that.

Speaker 11 And so it's quite challenging when there's personal cost involved to get people to be altruistic. So I would definitely say make it much easier to be altruistic.

Speaker 11 So make it easy for people to be altruistic. And I think something that we should acknowledge is that it's really a position of privilege to be able to help others.

Speaker 11 If people are functioning well it will be easier for them to be altruistic to others but I think one of the biggest things and this is a real challenge is changing social norms.

Speaker 11 So if you can encourage people to create norms where giving money to charity or being kind to others is what you see around them, that's going to have a huge impact on how much we are willing to do that ourselves.

Speaker 1 I know when we had Helen Sharman on a while ago and she was talking about the thing that she learnt most

Speaker 1 well before and after she went into space was when she went to Russia, she had gone kind of living that late 80s, early 90s. You know, I've got a fast car and I've got a motorbike and I've got this.

Speaker 1 And then she went there and she found out how little compared to in the UK there was in Russia, but how everyone asked, when they asked how you were, they really wanted to know, how are you?

Speaker 1 Are you okay? And she said, that was the biggest lesson.

Speaker 1 I was wondering, we've talked a lot about numbers, but when we were sitting this afternoon just chatting about, and we were thinking a lot about Dunbar's number.

Speaker 1 We were thinking of that thing that 150 people is, you know, for a whole community and for everyone you're going to meet in your life.

Speaker 1 That's kind of the optimum amount to be able to build relationships, however minor that person is in your life. And I mean, are we looking also with altruism?

Speaker 1 Would we be able to say, yes, that the larger the model you get, the harder it is to find altruism there?

Speaker 10 I mean, Robin Dunbar came up with that theory a long time ago.

Speaker 10 The number was somewhat plucked from the air, I have to say. There's obviously a limit to the number of people you can know and individually help.

Speaker 10 I don't know 150 people, good God, they know you, they know me.

Speaker 1 I've been to those pubs.

Speaker 11 There's actually a bit of work on this. So, things like scope insensitivity or something called the identifiable victim effects.

Speaker 11 So, for scope insensitivity, it's the idea that as we start to deal with bigger and bigger numbers,

Speaker 11 we're not really able to understand the scope.

Speaker 11 And so, we don't have, for example, you know, saving 100 lives is great, saving 150 lives should be that percentage increase, but we don't get that much more reward from it.

Speaker 11 And so we're actually not very good, both in terms of thinking about altruism, but also thinking about suffering.

Speaker 11 And so there's something called the identifiable victim effect, which shows that if you give people sort of images of little children and say, oh, you know, these children are sick and they need money so that we can cure them of their disease.

Speaker 11 So if you show an individual child or a group of eight children, people will actually give more money to the individual child than they will to the group of eight because it's easier to relate to that individual child and you can identify that victim.

Speaker 11 And so there's quite a lot of work work showing that bigger numbers are not very good for us in terms of understanding the suffering and understanding the need for altruism.

Speaker 1 What was that line by Stalin? Oh, no, it's not very specific. That was it.

Speaker 1 No, was it the little story? Do you know what? This is just my audition for the reboot of quote unquote.

Speaker 11 Death of one is a tragedy. The death of one is a tragedy, but the death of millions are just a statistic.

Speaker 13 All right, nice guy.

Speaker 1 Joe, I have to ask this as well because you've been in stand-up good 15, 20 years now or so.

Speaker 1 And stand-up comics, sometimes we've seen those versions in kind of, you know, movies and perhaps green rooms as well, where they can seem cruel and this kind of what do you feel in terms of the altruism or generosity of stand-ups?

Speaker 13 This reminds me of a line someone did, I think early 90s, and I'm not going to say who it was because I don't want to get them into trouble, but I thought it was funny.

Speaker 13 They said, Oh, I see

Speaker 13 Mother Teresa has just retired at the age of eighty, lazy cow.

Speaker 13 I mean, that's actually, I think that what that shows is how amazing people think she was in a way, you know, because there wouldn't really be much of a reaction, and that's what comics do.

Speaker 13 I don't think, I think, I think the problem, the problem with today and social media is that it's that altruism is performative these days.

Speaker 13 And if you're being altruistic and you've got 200,000 followers on Instagram, that's very different, isn't it?

Speaker 13 Because we were sort of always taught that if you do something good for someone, don't go around boasting about it, or that ruins it, really.

Speaker 13 But the problem with that is if you're altruistic and embarrassed about it, and you give millions to a charity and don't tell anyone, how are they ever going to know?

Speaker 1 But it's an interesting thing because I think of someone like George Michael, and it seems that since he died, more and more things have come out about his generosity as a human being and buying John Lennon's white piano just so he could then send it to different places like hospitals and places where people are recovering because he knew that it had this kind of mystical thing and and that was all done with with no sense of this is my story just I've got lots of money and I want to do something good with it and that's there seems to be a real purity and kind of beauty and things like that.

Speaker 11 Matty?

Speaker 11 I think that's completely true, but I also, coming back to this discussion before we're having about how to encourage people to be more altruistic, if you don't tell anybody about it, then it doesn't become a social norm.

Speaker 11 And so I'm torn because I agree, I think there's something really off-putting about performative altruism, especially if you think that the person's not genuine in their motivations.

Speaker 11 But on the other hand, if the help is there and things are getting better because of it, then I think that's a good thing too. So there's not really a simple answer in my mind.

Speaker 13 I think one way that we're moving is one thing I think encourages people to be more altruistic is personalizing it. So whereas

Speaker 13 you would be asked to say donate to a charity for food in Africa. Now,

Speaker 13 you can do it in so many ways.

Speaker 13 You actually get a named family and you can sort of buy something for them and you know what they're doing. I think that makes a big difference.
Or you can get them a goat.

Speaker 13 I've always liked the idea of that. No one's got me one yet, but maybe one day.

Speaker 1 After this, you're suddenly going to go, I wish I'd mentioned that bloody goat thing. I'm going to get a bigger garden now, aren't I?

Speaker 12 We've run out of time, I suppose.

Speaker 1 So, some of you You told me time is a fiction. We can go on as long as we want, according to the laws of physics.

Speaker 12 Disappointingly for me, it seems we've got a very simple summary, which is altruism is good.

Speaker 12 It's a good thing. I was hoping there'd be at least something

Speaker 12 that suggested that it was not a good idea. Does anyone want to disagree with that?

Speaker 1 It's a good thing. Welcome to the moral case.
It's human kindness, good or bad. So, we asked the audience a question, didn't we, Brian?

Speaker 12 We did. What is the least...
See, this is good. This is at least negative.

Speaker 12 At least some darkness here. What is the least altruistic thing they've ever done?

Speaker 1 Joe, what have you got?

Speaker 13 In a restaurant, played football with the last pork chop, only for it to be the last pork chop ordered.

Speaker 1 Very good. What does that even mean?

Speaker 12 This is a good tip, this one. So to get out of the festival car park, I put on a high-vis jacket to stop the traffic and get my car out.

Speaker 13 Can I just read this one out?

Speaker 1 Because I've got all the weird ones.

Speaker 13 Volunteering as a scout leader five years ago because I fancied the lady who ran the group.

Speaker 13 Oh, there she is.

Speaker 13 And we're on our third date this evening.

Speaker 13 What, three dates in five years?

Speaker 13 That sounds like my kind of relationship.

Speaker 13 I'm not going to say your name just in case that's.

Speaker 1 Well, the second date might have been involving like tying knots and they go, I only just got out and now.

Speaker 13 I ran a half marathon but didn't raise any money for charity.

Speaker 1 Well done you.

Speaker 1 This is great. I was looking for darkness, right?

Speaker 12 I used my dad's disability to get rugby world cut tickets.

Speaker 1 Okay. Right, so thank you very much to our panel, Matty Wilkes, Steve Jones, and Joe Brand.

Speaker 1 Next week, we are very excited looking at the best process of cryogenically freezing Brian so that every generation can enjoy looking at his perfectly preserved nose and head. It's not actually.

Speaker 1 Well, it is, it's kind of. What we're actually doing is we're doing a show all about the science of ice.

Speaker 1 But I thought, while we've got experts there who know how to freeze stuff, it might be nice to just freeze you.

Speaker 12 The more urgent question is how to preserve you, isn't it?

Speaker 1 I mean, we've got to do it somehow. Anyway, thank you so much for joining us, and we'll see you next time.
Bye-bye.

Speaker 1 In the infinite monkey cave,

Speaker 1 in the infinite monkey cage.

Speaker 13 Till now, nice again.

Speaker 10 Hello, Russell Kane here.

Speaker 1 I used to love British history. Be proud of it.
Henry VIII, Queen Victoria, massive fan of stand-up comedians. Obviously, Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor.

Speaker 1 That has become much more challenging, for I am the host of BBC Radio 4's Evil Genius, the show where we take heroes and villains from history and try to work out were they evil or genius.

Speaker 1 Do not catch up on BBC Sounds by searching Evil Genius if you don't want to see your heroes destroyed. But if, like me, you quite enjoy it, have a little search.

Speaker 1 Listen to Evil Genius with me, Russell Cain. Go to BBC Sounds and have your world destroyed.

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