Why Altruism Will Make You Happy and Healthy

Altruism provides something of an evolutionary conundrum. Darwin told us that the fittest will survive to reproduce and pass their genes onto the next generation. Logic tells us then that people should try to maximise their fitness in order to maximise their chances of reproducing. But altruism is a willful act of self-sacrifice for the benefit of someone else. It is deliberately reducing your own fitness to help someone else.

There are a number of theories about why humans are altruistic. The theory of ‘parochial altruism’ simply supposes that we help those who are part of our group, in the same way as we defend ourselves against those from outside of our group. ‘Reciprocal altruism’ sees acts of altruism as banking good will: I’ll buy you a pint today so you help me move house next week. ‘Competitive altruism’ is perhaps the most cynical theory. In this theory acts of altruism are a display to the opposite sex: ‘look how fit I am, I can afford to give things away to other people so why not mate with me’.

Despite our difficulty understanding altruism, as it is a universal feature of human behaviour there must be powerful drivers behind it.

Many of us will instinctively understand the urge to help out those with whom we are close but there are numerous examples in life of people behaving with incredible altruism towards others with whom they have no connection. An extreme example is ‘Give a Kidney’ which is a UK charity that helps to promote and facilitate the altruistic donation of kidneys by living people to people with whom they have no connection. Each year around 100 people in the UK imperil their own future health to improve the life of someone they may never meet (1).

It is hard to believe that the act of giving a kidney to a stranger can be derived from an evolutionary survival instinct. So is altruism really an evolved trait or just a product of our culture? After all, most major world religions inculcate a sense of charity amongst their devotees. Is altruism a cerebral, religious construct, rather than an instinctive, evolutionary drive?

Studies show that our youngest children are almost indiscriminately altruistic. Two year olds will keep helping and sharing things with another child regardless of how the other child behaves back (2). Children are also more likely to help others who they have seen experience mistreatment previously and researchers have even been able to measure the physiological response of toddlers as they watch someone getting the help they need from a third party. This physiological response is thought to show that children are not just motivated by ‘getting credit’ for helping others, but instinctively want to see other people being looked after (3,4).

Interestingly, one study sought to directly address whether altruism was a product of religion and somewhat surprisingly found that children from more deeply religious backgrounds were less likely to behave altruistically and more likely to behave punitively towards others (5).

Whatever the underlying reason for the development of altruism in humans, for humans to continue to act altruistically there must be some kind of immediate reward for doing good. When we help someone else I suspect that very few of us are consciously calculating the odds of receiving repayment of some kind in the future, or how likely we are to get ourselves a new mate as a result. If these things are the long term evolutionary reward for altruism then there must also be something more immediately tangible that rewards us for treating others well to ensure that we keep doing so.

Our bodies and our minds reward us for all kinds of things if those things benefit us. An easy example of this is sex. We get lots of physical and psychological rewards from sex and these are so obvious that it seems strange even to wonder why we have evolved to feel them. But if sex brought us no pleasure we probably wouldn’t spend our time doing it and so we wouldn’t reproduce.

The rewards from helping a friend or giving to charity may not be quite as dramatic as those that we get from having sex, but there is good evidence that humans feel intrinsic rewards when they do something to help someone else. People actually report higher levels of happiness when spending money on others rather than on themselves (6). Functional MRI scanning has shown that when people give to charity the ‘reward’ centres of the brain are active (7). Even toddlers have been shown to be happier when giving biscuits to a puppet than when receiving the treats themselves (8).

Those who volunteer in order to help others report themselves to be both happier and healthier than those who don’t. In fact voluntary work has been shown to cancel out the unhappiness that is associated with low socioeconomic status. What this means is that, whilst low socioeconomic status is a risk factor for unhappiness, voluntary work can reduce or nullify this (9). Giving support to those around us has also been shown to reduce our chance of dying whereas receiving support appears to have no effect on our death rates (10). Essentially, altruistic people are happier and live longer.

This tendency to altruism is of enormous potential value to us both at an individual level and as a society. It is clear that people are happier when they behave altruistically and there are obvious benefits to us as a society from having our citizens act regularly to help one another. If nothing else, altruism is of huge economic benefit with voluntary work contributing $400 billion to the global economy each year (11).

But we have a problem. For generations our institutions and organisations have worked on the assumption that human beings are inherently selfish because this is what economists, biologists and psychologists have long thought. This has created a society that organises itself primarily around financial incentives (12) and one that ignores, or at the very least undervalues, our natural propensity to co-operate with one another for the benefit not just of ourselves but of those around us.

The evidence of the past few decades from the spheres of economics, psychology, anthropology and neurobiology tells us that we need to turn received wisdom on it’s head. As individuals, and as a society as a whole, we should be seeking to take advantage of our natural impulse to be altruistic in order to have happier, healthier, and longer lives.