Scientific evidence suggests that humans have a biological desire to help others, including strangers. Altruistic behavior towards strangers is uniquely human and observed at a very young age. Dr. Felix ken and Dr. Michael Tomasello Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have shown that children as young as 18 months want to help strangers. When their 18-month-old subjects saw a stranger throw a pencil on the floor, none of them picked it up. However, when the same subjects saw someone"accidentally" drop a pencil, nearly all the children picked it up in the first ten seconds. Says Dr. Warneken, "The results were astonishing because these children are so young. They still wear diapers and are barely able to use language, but they already show helping behavior." Because altruistic behavior. appears in ehildren so young, Dr. Warneken and other scientists hypothesize that the human brain is designed to be altruistic.
Mirror Neurons
By using brain scans, neuroscientists are making new discoveries about the biology of the human brain. The recent discovery of mirror neurons in humans leads to scientists' belief that the brain can influence altruistic behavior. Mirror neurons are ordinary brain cells located throughout the brain. They"light up" when a person is performing an action or observing someoneelse doing a similar action. Mirror neurons make us cry when we see someone else cry or smile when someone smiles at us. our mirror neurons actually feel what they feel. They cry and smile along with them.
How, then, can mirror neurons bring about altruistic behavior? By helping us feel what others feel, mirror neurons naturally make us feel compassionate. They allow us to put ourselves in someone else's situation; without them, we would not understand or care about other people's emotions. Would we help hurricane victims? Give moneyto the poor? Save lives? Probably not, says Marco Iacoboni, a leading neuroscientist"We are good because our biology drives us to be good." In other words, mirror neurons seem to prepare us to be altruistic.
Neuroeconomics
Neuroeconomist Bill Harbaugh and his team at the University of Oregon study the biology of altruism. They look specifically at neuroeconomics, or the connection between the brain and economic decisions. In one of their experiments, the researchers tried seeing if people's donations to charity were affected by neurons. Nineteen women were given $100 to play a charity game on the computer. They could choose to donate or not to a charity, each decision leading to other situations where they could gain or lose money. At the end of the game the subjects were able to keep all the money that was left in their accounts.
As the subjects played the game, the scientists scanned their brains. They looked at the brain's"pleasure center," which controls how good people feel. When most subjects donated money to a charity, their pleasure centers lit up on the brain scan. Some even lit up when the subjects were taxed on their donation. Both results suggest that the brain's pleasure center is rewarded for altruistic acts. In addition, the more people donated, the more their pleasure centers lit up. For some, the pleasure center lit up more when the computer gave the charity extra moneythan when they received extra money keep for themselves. The scientists point out that this was"the first neural evidence for... pure altruism," meaning that altruism may indeed have a biological connection.