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An old philosophical chestnut concerns the question of what motivates acts of altruism: selflessness or self-interest. Some argue that humans are most likely to help others in contexts where their actions also indirectly benefit themselves or their kin and loved ones.
Scientists have mostly attempted to resolve this conundrum by observing behavior and have found that while people do act in the interests of others, they are less likely to do so when they are dealing with members of outgroups, and will often cheat strangers in economic games.
Recently, however, a team of scientists approached the question of what guides altruism from the perspective of motivation. The team, including Kyle Law, a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University, and Ph.D. student Seoyeon Bae from Boston College, studied anonymous survey responses from almost 1 million individuals spread over more than 100 countries, taking into account different cultural contexts, age ranges, socioeconomic levels, and time periods. They found that the vast majority reported performing acts of altruism because they were interested in the well-being of others, not because these acts benefitted them indirectly.
“People are more likely to want to be remembered for making a difference, helping others, and improving the world,” says Bae, “and to value things like caring over status or personal gains.”
The scientists assessed motivations for acts of altruism along three different dimensions: legacy (how they wish to be remembered), life aspirations, and basic human values. They used different datasets for each dimension. For their analysis of legacy motivations, they conducted secondary analyses on data from 8,000 individuals across 22 previously collected samples from world populations. Their analysis suggested that when thinking about what kind of legacy they want to leave, people are significantly more likely to report being motivated by making a positive impact on the world than by strengthening their reputations. “That shocked me,” said Law.
People are more likely to value things like caring over status or personal gains.
To identify how life aspirations shape motivations to perform altruistic acts they analyzed responses from 59 study samples across 22 countries collected over two decades. In this analysis, they found people were much more likely to report being motivated by values such as personal growth and community giving than by values such as wealth or fame. In the final analysis, which examined how basic human values shape altruistic motivations, they used three large-scale global datasets—one of undergraduate students, another of primarily European adults, and a third of individuals from a more geographically diverse set of 78 countries—and found that values such as universalism and benevolence were more common reported motivators of altruism than values such as power, hedonism, and achievement. They also found that more individualistic countries, such as the United States, actually scored higher on other-oriented motivations than more communal ones such as Japan, a surprising finding, as individualistic cultures are often thought to be more selfish.
Trying to understand why people act the way they do by simply asking them to explain their behavior is generally viewed with skepticism by psychology researchers, and for good reason. We often don’t know why we act the way we do, and will make up a reason on the spot without realizing it, and that reason may be self-serving. Psychologists call this “confabulation.” Another possibly larger problem is the “social desirability bias”—people will often tell researchers what they think they want to hear or what they think will impress the experimenter.
This study relied on self-report, which is prone to both biases. However, people present less of this bias in anonymous surveys like the ones used here. Further, the survey respondents the scientists analyzed included populations of identifiable altruists: people who donate organs to strangers and others who belong to the effective altruist movement, which is focused on finding the most efficient way of helping the maximum number of people in the world. If the average survey respondent was just trying to look good, rather than reflecting honestly on their motivations, we might expect them to score similarly to the organ donors, the researchers reasoned. But they didn’t. The effective altruists and organ donors had much higher scores on altruistic motivations.
“We did expect some difference, but the magnitude was really striking, and it drove home for us the idea that these aren’t just people that behave differently,” Law said, “They seem to think differently, value different things, and prioritize helping others at a deep motivational level. And it also made the results feel more real to us and more grounded, not just survey noise or social desirability, but a reflection of something that’s more meaningful and possibly enduring.”
We should take care not to assume people are always selfish. That’s a bias, too. Human motivations are difficult to discern. Studies show that when observing others perform acts of altruism, we tend to assume they are doing so to benefit their reputations, but we don’t apply this bias to ourselves.
“The study matters because our assumptions related to human nature shape everything,” Bae says. “If we assume people are primarily self-interested, we would design systems around incentives, competition, or punishment. But if people are motivated by concern for others… we can build systems that nurture and amplify those motivations in a very positive way.”
Of course, motivation does not always lead to action. But there is a comfort in knowing that the motivation to be good is there. We just need to learn how to tap into it. 
Lead image: Login / Shutterstock
