When people increase their cognitive load, be it via stress or uncertainty, for example, they become less prosocial toward strangers. Similarly, when people are hungry, they are less charitable. The hungry judge effect is a finding that judges were more inclined to be lenient after a meal but more severe before the break. When people feel socially excluded, they become less generous and empathetic.
Mice and humans become more empathetic toward strangers when given a drug that blocks glucocorticoid secretion. Glucocorticoids are a class of corticosteroids, which are a class of steroid hormones such as Cortisol or Adrenaline.
Thus, when one feels very distressed, whether because one empathizes with someone else’s problems or because of one’s own problems, meeting one’s own needs easily becomes the priority.
In other words, empathic states are most likely to lead to compassionate actions when we take a detached stance.
One acts compassionately toward a person because one wishes well for the world. This releases more dopamine in oneself than doing something good for oneself. Part of self-interest reflects concern for self-definition.
Personality profiles show that people who are charitable tend to define themselves by their charity. Highly charitable people tend to have been raised by parents who were charitable and who emphasized charitable acts as a moral imperative.
What about the self-serving reputational gain of altruism, the cachet of conspicuous generosity rather than conspicuous consumption?
People become more prosocial when their reputation depends on it.
Personality profiles also show that especially charitable people tend to be especially dependent on external recognition.
Subjects were given money, and while in a brain scanner, they had to decide whether to keep the money or donate it. Charity activated dopamine “reward” systems when an observer was present.
When no one was present, dopamine flowed most when subjects kept the money for themselves.
Philosopher Moses Maimon emphasized that the purest form of charity, the one least tainted by self-interest, is when both the giver and the receiver are anonymous.
And as brain scanners show, this is perhaps also the rarest form.
If good deeds must be motivated by self-interest, the motive of reputation, the desire to be the biggest donor at the charity event, seems most likely to merit irony.
In contrast, the motivation to think of oneself as a good person seems a fairly innocuous one. Yes, it’s better if our compassion is guided by the greatest need rather than the most easily shared pain.
Yet there is no reason why we should expect ourselves to have particularly good intuitions if we want to heal this widely dispersed, heterogeneous world. One does not act because another’s pain is so painful that one must flee from it. But the distance one should strive for does not mean choosing a “cognitive” approach to doing good over an “affective” one.
The key is neither a good (limbic) heart nor a cortex that can make you act. Instead, it’s about things that have long since become implicit and automatic — riding a bike, telling the truth, helping someone in need.
All in all, it’s pretty remarkable that when an individual is in pain, we (i.e., we humans, primates, mammals) are triggered to be in a state of pain as well.
Ultimately, however, the issue is whether an empathic state actually leads to compassionate action, to avoid empathy being an end in itself.
The gap between the state and the action can be enormous, especially if the goal is for the action to be not only effective but also blameless in its motives.
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