Altruism

[AnOminous]

Altruism is, basically, selflessness.

It is when you do something good for someone else with absolutely no expectation of reward.

Why does this exist?

Humans exist because of an incredibly lengthy process of elimination, that is, evolution. So why do we care about others at all? It seems to be a shared trait of intelligent animals. After all, elephants have been seen saving other animals with absolutely no advantage to themselves. They seem to recognize and actually care about other creatures, just as we do.

Why?

 

[Oh Long Johnson]

I believe it might be part of whatever switch goes off when we anthropomorphize animals. I actually wonder if the elephants anthropomorphize other animals similarly.

We know we get a nice little package of chemicals from our brain when we help others and feel satisfaction/pride. An interesting study would be one where the subjects were unaware of the chemical reward for altruism or cut off from it for a long period of time. If you don't know you'll feel good, is there an actual point? That would drill down into true altruism and point towards a possible objective morality.

Being an unread savage in psychology and neurology, this has probably already been tested and is old news.

 

[vertexwindi]

Arguably there is an evolutionary benefit to altruism. We're not just trying to secure our own existence, but the existence of the group too.

 

[ZeCommissar]

Doing true selflessness could be because of empathy, while I don't know how much empathy a animal could feel towards another animal, most humans have enough empathy to where they don't want to see someone suffer, or just because its nice.

In the wild it has been shown that swans that act more selfish when it comes to food have a lesser chance of finding a mate, while in human society being completely selfish might get you seen as a dick.

I saw a video recently where a mother lion protects a hurt fox from the rest of the pride, and the pride just chills and sleeps around the fox until it eventually goes away. Now whether the lion mistook the fox for a cub and motherly instinct kicked in, or it actually felt some form of empathy is hard to say.

 

[Wallace]

One reason is because we get a reciprocal benefit from it. Social animals, including us, require a group to function best, both socially and biologically. Think of a wolf pack that coordinates to hunt.

 

[Overcast]

Here's the way I see it.

If you were placed in a situation where you could save your own life or your child's, chances are, you'd probably save your kid's life. From an emotional standpoint, you did your job as a parent and saved the life of a loved one.

From an evolutionary standpoint, it also means that kid will probably grow up to have kids of their own, thus your DNA still lives on. But I guess in a sense that's no longer altruism, so who knows?

Also, I'd imagine the belief in karma also plays a factor. You do something good for someone else, chances are, something good may happen to you at some point in the future. Whether this is true or not, I can's say, but it's something to think about I suppose.

 

[The Giver]

I believe one good way to think about evolution isn't just in terms of promoting one's own survival, but rather of one's broader gene pool. As in, what matters from an evolutionary perspective isn't so much whether you survive, but that folks with the same sorts of genes as you survive. Thus, we can expect that having a tendency toward taking selfless actions that benefit members of your gene pool would be evolutionarily advantageous.

Of course, evolution can't just automatically select who we feel this impulse for, so it makes sense that the tendency toward altruism is triggered by people more generally, rather than just our specific gene pool.

TL;DR: I think there is a very plausible case to be made that altruism is evolutionarily advantageous.

 

[Holdek]

I believe it might be part of whatever switch goes off when we anthropomorphize animals. I actually wonder if the elephants anthropomorphize other animals similarly.

We know we get a nice little package of chemicals from our brain when we help others and feel satisfaction/pride. An interesting study would be one where the subjects were unaware of the chemical reward for altruism or cut off from it for a long period of time. If you don't know you'll feel good, is there an actual point? That would drill down into true altruism and point towards a possible objective morality.

Being an unread savage in psychology and neurology, this has probably already been tested and is old news.

I don't think this has been comprehensively tested because the reward systems are so complex.

 

[Wallace]

I believe one good way to think about evolution isn't just in terms of promoting one's own survival, but rather of one's broader gene pool. As in, what matters from an evolutionary perspective isn't so much whether you survive, but that folks with the same sorts of genes as you survive. Thus, we can expect that having a tendency toward taking selfless actions that benefit members of your gene pool would be evolutionarily advantageous.

Of course, evolution can't just automatically select who we feel this impulse for, so it makes sense that the tendency toward altruism is triggered by people more generally, rather than just our specific gene pool.

TL;DR: I think there is a very plausible case to be made that altruism is evolutionarily advantageous.

That's called kin altruism.

 

[Cengiz Haan]

My own personal belief is that alturism helped humans during the cave days. There wasn't enough food to go around in the community, so it was better to share it.

 

[Jan_Hus]

Helping people usually makes you feel good, and we humans love doing (usually) what makes you feel good. There's some research that says that being nice releases endorphins and happy chemicals.

 

[AnOminous]

Helping people usually makes you feel good, and we humans love doing (usually) what makes you feel good. There's some research that says that being nice releases endorphins and happy chemicals.

There's usually an evolutionary reason of some sort for why certain things trigger certain emotional responses that either encourage or discourage that kind of behavior, though.

 

[waffle]

There are a couple easy reasons that Altruism is adaptive. Society rewards brave and selfless acts with prestige and increased chances to fuck. Further, people are morel likely to be altruistic to people who they know to be altruistic. This is a big part of why sociopaths are so feared, there is a general unspoken system of reciprocal altruism in society and they are the free rider problem. The other thing is that when you Scarface for your family, you are helping them pass on some of your genes because you are, after all, genetically similar.

 

[Sexy Rexxy]

For "cerebral" animals, it could be the pride boost thing. If you do something really cool for someone, it feels good and you wake up the next morning treating life a little different than you did before the event. This, in turn, carries a set of advantages that would be beneficial in an evolutionary sense. This would be true whether or not the recipient knew about the charity.
Not sure if elephants feel emotion, or what that emotion would look like.

 

[WW 635]

There is no such thing as a selfless act. Even those who don't seem to gain anything material still receive a neurological reward from an altruistic act. They get to feel good about themselves and give themselves asspats or w/e.

Sometimes people are prompted to prosocial behaviour by affective empathy system in the brain. It's this really intrusive mechanism where people feel what they see or imagine other people are feeling. So seeing sometime in pain causes an observer to also feel pain empathetically and causes them to try to remove their own pain by removing the source which is the other person's pain.

Genuine altruism is not a thing. You're all selfish.

 

[Jan_Hus]

There's usually an evolutionary reason of some sort for why certain things trigger certain emotional responses that either encourage or discourage that kind of behavior, though.

An organized group (or tribe) tends to function better if all of its members get along, one way to ensure this is to be altruistic towards other members of your group.

 

[Mexican_Wizard_711]

Altrusim Is Cringe