Understanding Altruism

Psychologists typically define altruism as a selfless interest for the good and welfare of others, that leads to such prosocial behaviors as cooperation, helping and sharing.

Acting with an unselfish regard for others doesn't always come naturally, even though many psychologists believe we're hard-wired for empathy. After all, cooperative behavior did allow our ancestors to survive under harsh conditions. But most of us realize that when we make the effort to give without expectations of reciprocity, we feel fulfilled and energized. To help others is a constant choice you can make every day. Giving money to someone on the street, helping the elderly cross the road, help someone get something off the shelf at the grocery store are all examples of altruistic behaviors. Putting others before yourself and acting in an unselfish manner.

What is Altruistic Behavior?

Altruistic behaviors are selfless acts that put the wellbeing of others before yourself and not expecting anything in return. This could be anything from helping someone reach something in the grocery store to giving someone in need an organ. More recently people have thought as altruistic behaviors as something that can be beneficial for both parties. An example someone volunteering at a hospital and can also put the experience on their college application.

Explanation of altruistic behaviors through biological reasoning.

It turns out that empathy does have something to do with altruistic behaviors. Empathy is a strong determinate for altruistic behaviors that motivate individuals to behave altruistically. This basis of sympathetic and moral concerns for others drives people to act altruistically. When you engage in altruistic behaviors, you feel more fulfilled and energized. These feelings also occur when you watch someone engage in altruistic behaviors due to the mirror neurons. Even though empathy and altruistic behaviors are not the same, they are intertwined.

Empathy is the understanding of someone else’s perspective or rather putting you into someone else’s shoes. Empathy focuses more so on emotions. This is because the origin of empathy comes from the Greek word empaths which can be broken down into me– and pathos meaning feelings and emotion. As discussed earlier in this article, the origin of altruism is not attached to any sort of emotion. On a neurological level, the emotion center of the brain such as the amygdala, insula, and striatum are activated when someone displays an act of empathy. There is even a special type of neuron that fires: mirror neurons. Mirror neurons help reproduce emotions that you are seeing being expressed by others.

The question of why human beings is sometimes prepared to risk their own lives to save others has puzzled philosophers and scientists for centuries. From an evolutionary point of view, altruism doesn’t seem to make any sense. According to the modern Neo-Darwinian view, human beings are basically selfish. After all, we are only really ‘carriers’ of thousands of genes, whose only aim is to survive and replicate themselves. We shouldn’t be interested in sacrificing ourselves for others, or even in helping others. It’s true that, in genetic terms, it’s not necessarily self-defeating for us to help people close to us, our relatives or distant cousins—they carry many of the same genes as us, and so helping them may help our genes to survive.

All acts of altruism are spiritual acts, in that they affirm and enhance our essential oneness.

To sum up, to truly be of service to someone, we must first focus on the other person’s needs and not on our own. We can then try and put ourselves in others’ shoes to find out what they really need, with the sole intention to do good. Thus, we realise that altruism is first and foremost an inner disposition to want what is best for others; it is the process of developing love for our fellow human beings.

Science is finally catching up to Spirituality.