Abigail (Abby) Marsh

If there's a national emergency, if there's a blood shortage, this is a way that we can all pitch in to help.

And so it's gone from, I think at one time, being a somewhat extraordinarily altruistic thing to do to being a more ordinary form of altruism.

And I hope that in the future, rare forms of altruism like donating bone marrow or donating organs will maybe follow the same course.

At the national level, we find that countries that are overall wealthier, that are healthier, people live longer, that have higher levels of education, and also where people report higher levels of flourishing and life satisfaction, we see much higher levels of altruism than countries in which both objective and subjective well-being are lower.

Isn't that remarkable?

I think that it's something that we should not overlook and think, oh, well, that's what billionaires are expected to do.

Why would they be expected to do that?

It's incredible that this is something that is so common among very wealthy people to just give their money away to help various causes.

And

Fortunately, it is something of a norm among the very wealthy.

Now, I will also say that it's true that people who are very selfish and narcissistic and greedy often desire to have a lot of money and power and status.

And so of course there are people of any strata of the wealth distribution who are very unselfish and people who are very selfish.

There's no question that that's true.

And there are some very selfish people who do seem to seek out a lot of wealth.

That said, if you look across the whole spectrum of objective well-being, including variables like social status and wealth, on average, it seems like the better off people are, the more likely they're willing to give to help others, which I think suggests that when people have the physical and psychological resources to help other people, helping other people is the natural thing to do, and it is what most people do.

It may seem a little bit paradoxical that if improved well-being leads to greater altruism, that times of crisis could also lead to greater altruism, but both things seem to be true.

This fact is very surprising because we're all familiar with stories like the Lord of the Flies where a disaster setting brings out the worst in people and causes them to turn on one another.

But if you look at real life scenarios of crises and disasters, it's astonishingly common how often people actually band together to help one another.

We saw after the COVID-19 pandemic that globally altruistic behavior went up in the aftermath of the pandemic.

People actually reported giving even more help to strangers, volunteering and donating to charity than they had before the pandemic.