Selfish or Selfless?
A Paper on Altruistic Human Nature During Stressful Situations
It can be heard everywhere, in the grumblings of adults lamenting over how each generation is more self-centered than the last, to each new online article presenting the bold headline that all humans are inherently bad at heart. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you grew up, you’ve heard the repeated mantra that humans are selfish. This idea has been ingrained into our society and media so thoroughly that if you were to ask a group of students to fill in the blank to the statement, “Humans are ____”, the majority would answer something with a negative connotation (Keltner 2). But despite the constant attempts to reduce humanity to its worst, the truth …show more content…
This idea further extends to what is sometimes referred to as “the principle of cost benefit reversal” (Keltner 4). This means that when you are faced with the choice of helping others versus helping yourself, you weigh the cost of each side and choose which side will make you feel better, whether it’s helping yourself or helping others to make yourself feel good (Keltner 4). This principle seems air-tight, until you find yourself in a situation where helping others could cause you to die. If humans were completely selfish, this becomes fairly simple: they would forsake the others and save themselves. And yet, on numerous occasions humans haven’t left those in need to save themselves. Instead they put their own lives at risk to help others. This point is further explained through a lecture by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize Winning psychologist, in which he explained that humans don’t always act with reason or self-interest, and stated that “intuitive thoughts come to mind without explicit intention, and without any confrontation, and this is one of their distinctive aspects”. This shows that people will choose to be selfless to help others, even when, by all laws of self preservation, they should have chosen the selfish …show more content…
A perfect example of this was written by Elie Wiesel in his autobiography Night. The book is about the Holocaust from the point of view of a fifteen year old Jewish boy who is taken with his father to a concentration camp. The Holocaust is an interesting time (albeit also horrifying and heartbreaking) because rarely in our recorded history will you find the same level of stripped humanity. By this I mean that learned values that the inmates had before they were forced into the camps, like manners and customs, were wiped away. In their place, all that was left was the raw, basic human emotions and instincts that are written in our DNA. Considering this, you would think these camps would be abound with greedy and selfish people, and yet that wasn’t always the case. In fact, there was one part of the book that strongly exemplified the unselfishness in humans. In the book, Eli (the young boy) and his father had just arrived to Auschwitz, a concentration camp in Poland, and were about to be questioned by a Nazi, when a prisoner came up to them. The prisoner asked Eli how old he was, and when Eli replied, the prisoner said, “No. Eighteen.” The prisoner did the same with Eli’s father, telling his father he was forty, not fifty. Eli and his father quickly
A Paper on Altruistic Human Nature During Stressful Situations
It can be heard everywhere, in the grumblings of adults lamenting over how each generation is more self-centered than the last, to each new online article presenting the bold headline that all humans are inherently bad at heart. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you grew up, you’ve heard the repeated mantra that humans are selfish. This idea has been ingrained into our society and media so thoroughly that if you were to ask a group of students to fill in the blank to the statement, “Humans are ____”, the majority would answer something with a negative connotation (Keltner 2). But despite the constant attempts to reduce humanity to its worst, the truth …show more content…
This idea further extends to what is sometimes referred to as “the principle of cost benefit reversal” (Keltner 4). This means that when you are faced with the choice of helping others versus helping yourself, you weigh the cost of each side and choose which side will make you feel better, whether it’s helping yourself or helping others to make yourself feel good (Keltner 4). This principle seems air-tight, until you find yourself in a situation where helping others could cause you to die. If humans were completely selfish, this becomes fairly simple: they would forsake the others and save themselves. And yet, on numerous occasions humans haven’t left those in need to save themselves. Instead they put their own lives at risk to help others. This point is further explained through a lecture by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize Winning psychologist, in which he explained that humans don’t always act with reason or self-interest, and stated that “intuitive thoughts come to mind without explicit intention, and without any confrontation, and this is one of their distinctive aspects”. This shows that people will choose to be selfless to help others, even when, by all laws of self preservation, they should have chosen the selfish …show more content…
A perfect example of this was written by Elie Wiesel in his autobiography Night. The book is about the Holocaust from the point of view of a fifteen year old Jewish boy who is taken with his father to a concentration camp. The Holocaust is an interesting time (albeit also horrifying and heartbreaking) because rarely in our recorded history will you find the same level of stripped humanity. By this I mean that learned values that the inmates had before they were forced into the camps, like manners and customs, were wiped away. In their place, all that was left was the raw, basic human emotions and instincts that are written in our DNA. Considering this, you would think these camps would be abound with greedy and selfish people, and yet that wasn’t always the case. In fact, there was one part of the book that strongly exemplified the unselfishness in humans. In the book, Eli (the young boy) and his father had just arrived to Auschwitz, a concentration camp in Poland, and were about to be questioned by a Nazi, when a prisoner came up to them. The prisoner asked Eli how old he was, and when Eli replied, the prisoner said, “No. Eighteen.” The prisoner did the same with Eli’s father, telling his father he was forty, not fifty. Eli and his father quickly