Altruism

1658 Words4 Pages

1. Introduction
Altruism is unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others; behaviour by an animal that is not beneficial to or may be harmful to itself but that benefits others of its species. (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, n.d.)
We often may feel like we are doing something to benefit others, but consider Darwinian evolution, which is the theory according to which species evolve by natural selection - the basic mechanism of evolution whereby those individuals in a population that are best adapted to the environment survive and produce more offspring than others, thereby altering the composition of the population and eventually the characteristics of the species. (Oxford Dictionary of Psychology, 2001). With this in mind, altruistic behaviour makes little sense. The evolutionary theory suggests that our behaviour is driven by the need to survive and reproduce, and so complete altruism should only be necessary as displayed towards our blood relatives, and not towards other members of our species. We like to believe, however, that we are doing a good deed for another, but does this ever have no benefit to ourselves?
Extensive psychological study over many years have found various reasons as to why we commit pro-social behaviour, which would suggest that we do have ulterior motives that we may or may not be aware of in different situations. However, other evidence has found that in some situations we help others to relieve the distress we feel from the situation, as shown by the negative-state relief model, which is a concept developed by Schaller and Cialdini (1988). They suggested that egoistic motives induce helpful behaviour in bad circumstances because it reduces the distress we feel from witnessing. Others sug...

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...t/altruism-and-bystander-behaviour
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Tierney, J. (2007, June 19). Taxes a Pleasure? Check the Brain Scan. Retrieved from The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/19/science/19tier.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&
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Zizzo, D. J. (August 2011). Do Dictator Games Measure Altruism? University of East Anglia.

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