Altruism is evolutionary instinct says UCLA professor in new book
By Idan Ivri
Aug. 18, 2002 9:00 p.m.
Greedy corporate executives, greedy athletes, and greedy
politicians have loomed large in popular culture and the national
news over the past few months. But the apparently natural human
instinct to be selfish has been over-emphasized for too long,
according to UCLA professor Shelley Taylor in her new book.
In “The Tending Instinct: How Nurturing Is Essential to
Who We Are and How We Live,” Taylor argues there is a
distinct, evolved human tendency to nurture, befriend and protect
one another, especially during a common hardship.
Taylor uses the increasingly popular field of evolutionary
psychology in her research. According to this field of study, human
behavior today can be studied in terms of an adaptation to the
hardships of early, precivilized humans, an era which lasted for
thousands of years and formed human instincts.
One of the most heated arguments in the field today deals with
the causes of human altruism ““ why humans help one another
rather than act selfishly. It is widely accepted, especially among
evolutionary psychologists, that helping close relatives also
serves an important selfish purpose: passing on the family genes.
But what is less clear is the reason why humans help or nurture
non-relatives.
In her research, Taylor found that for adults, nurturing social
groups, even beyond the immediate family, are an evolutionary
adaptation that can lessen the negative effects of stress.
By measuring stress levels through questionnaires, levels of
“stress chemicals” like epinephrine and norepinephrine,
heart rate and blood pressure, Taylor found that people do not
always try to protect their own personal interests during difficult
times.
Taylor demonstrated that women more commonly “tend and
befriend” to cope with stress, meaning they band together and
build groups of allies and friends to protect each other and
especially their children.
Taylor discovered that men, when facing hardship, often build
hierarchies to channel their testosterone-fueled aggression into a
constructive attempt to protect the group.
“The tending and befriending behavior is more common in
women, but men have other ways of tending that benefit the social
group just as much,” Taylor said.
Today, many people live without the support of such a strong
social group around them.
“People who have friends are healthier than people who are
isolated. The culture we live in now doesn’t recognize the
importance of social ties to physical health,” Taylor
said.
The idea is that there are cumulative adverse effects to
constant exposure to stress, such as cardiovascular disease, Type 2
diabetes, and some lapses in immune functioning, Taylor said.
But beyond just mediating stress in adults, Taylor also explains
that nurturing care during early childhood is crucial for children
to be healthy later in life.
“There are big cultural differences in what ways children
are nurtured, but common to all is physical contact of all
kinds,” she said.
Recently, another study published in the Psychological Bulletin,
authored by UCLA professors Rena Repetti and Teresa Seeman along
with Shelley Taylor, also predicted a similar link between early
emotional care and physical health.
Titled “Risky families: Family social environments and the
mental and physical health of offspring,” the paper is a
review of more than 500 studies that together demonstrate that a
lack of nurturing and tending early in life leads to grave physical
and psychological health risks in adulthood.
Both the paper and “The Tending Instinct” agree, for
children, risky families are those which replace nurturing care
with coldness, aggression, lack of emotional support and frequent
conflicts.
Repetti said, “What we found is that children from
risky families are more likely to suffer later in life from heart
disease, diabetes, obesity, hypertension and even early
death.”
These health risks for non-nurtured babies are similar to those
found in solitary, stressed-out adults.
The “Risky families” study claims the human need for
nurturing is so essential to healthy development that the lack of
it has contributed to a two to threefold increase in suicide and
homicide among children over the past 30 years.
To illustrate the psychological importance of nurturing in
“The Tending Instinct,” Taylor describes the crowded
orphanages of old Communist Romania. Abandoned children there were
not usually physically abused, but instead were emotionally
neglected. Once they were released, many of these neglected
children could not understand criticism or praise or adapt to any
social group that tried to adopt them.
For Taylor, much of this tending behavior, which is crucial for
both healthy children and adults, is based on natural instincts,
not reason.
She studied “heroes” who risked their lives to save
others from danger or provided long term care for sick family
members. Taylor concluded that very few of them actually reasoned
through their decision to help, thought about what they were doing
at the time, or considered themselves to be heroes afterward. They
often simply acted without thinking.
Through various interviews, Taylor found that heroes, both men
and women, are reluctant to see themselves as special because they
feel others would do the same thing.
“I think that a lot of altruistic behavior is in the
genes. It’s not as much a mystery as we think,” she
said.
Taylor admits in “The Tending Instinct” certain
sciences of behavior, especially economics, directly contradict her
conclusions.
Various other theories about altruism have also been prominent
over the past few decades. Most of them used evolutionary
psychology to emphasize aggressive, individualistic motivations for
human action.
But in response Taylor coolly maintains, “Altruism is only
a puzzle to be explained if you start with the assumption that
people are selfishly aggressive.”
