Abigail (Abby) Marsh

I only figured it out later.

And what I realized is that he must have been among all of those cars that came across the crest of the freeway and saw my stranded car there.

He was the one that decided in the fraction of a second he had to make a decision to pull over into the off-ramp area and then run across six lanes of freeway traffic in the middle of the night to get to my car.

Well, in the immediate aftermath, I was so shaken up that my mom could tell when I woke up the next morning something terrible had happened.

I was in a little bit of shock, I think.

Dog lover that I am, I was horrified that I had killed a dog.

That really ate at me for a long time.

But more than that, I was in real shock over how close I had come to dying, closer than I have ever come before since dying.

And that dissipated over time, as it does.

What didn't dissipate is this worm in my brain that I sort of felt at the idea that the reason I had died or been terribly injured was because of the decisions of this man and struggling to understand what caused him to make the choice that he did, to endanger his life multiple times so seriously to help a person he'd never met and whose identity he could not possibly have known when he made the choice to help me.

That's a hard question to answer.

I have never been put in exactly that situation, but I've never done anything so dangerous to help a stranger.

Certainly not.

No, I think it's a very, very rare decision to make, and I have never made it.

In retrospect, absolutely.

I had already taken a course in psychology and had fallen in love with the idea that there is a science of human cognition and behavior.

But what very quickly happened after that is I started thinking about the psychology of why people help other people.

Why on earth somebody would make the decision to risk their own life to help another person?

And very quickly, my research took a turn toward that specific topic.

The first group of people that I chose to study to try to understand real-world extraordinary altruism was altruistic kidney donors, or as they're sometimes called, non-directed kidney donors, who give a kidney to an anonymous stranger knowing they may never meet them or know anything about what happened to them at the time of the donation.