A Study To Remind Us What It Means To Be Human

Generosity appears to be built into our brains.

It’s been a rough few months folks, I’m not going to lie. Now, as the nation tries to grapple with a potentially rebounding epidemic as well as with the health and welfare-based sequela of four centuries of racism, my expectations for the future have been growing pretty bleak.

But I read this study, appearing in Science Advances, which gave me a bit of hope.

No, it doesn’t address the health implications of systematic racism. It doesn’t promise a new treatment for COVID-19. What it does is remind us that, fundamentally, humans are creatures who take care of each other.

This paper examines the mystery of prosocial behavior in humans. Prosocial behaviors are those that benefit someone else, even when it hurts ourselves. They are the behaviors that knit society together, that keep us from killing and beating each other, and that keep us wearing masks to protect others even when it is inconvenient to us.

Humans can be pro-social for a variety of reasons. The authors identify four major drivers: