Abigail (Abby) Marsh

That oftentimes they hardly even realized what they were doing until they were in the middle of rescuing somebody.

And that afterwards, they often think, oh my gosh, I could have really been badly hurt or something else terrible could have happened.

But in the moment, no, they're not thinking about the risks and costs to themselves at all.

They really act immediately on a very, I think, sort of deep impulse.

Absolutely.

I think many people are surprised when I say that humans are an unusually altruistic species, but there's no question about it.

We are.

If you look across, for example, other primate species, humans are the most altruistic.

They're the most likely to share freely with other people with no expectation of benefit for themselves.

And the reason seems to be, maybe a little bit surprisingly, that humans are also what's called an alloparental species.

And that means that human adults are prepared to care and do care for infants who are not their own.

And that's not something you see in that many primate species.

But if you look across species, the very best predictor of how altruistic a species is, is how much care they provide for babies that are not their own.

And humans do this a lot.

And it seems to be the best explanation for why we're so altruistic.

It's truly astonishing.

And I think one of the reasons it's easy to forget is we spend so much of our life immersed in stories about the worst things that happen all around the world, which, of course, unfortunately, is what many social media and some traditional media sources are incentivized to tell us about.

And all that information pours into our brain about the terrible things that people do.

And it can leave people with sort of a cynical view that, oh, humans are so awful.

We do such awful things.