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There's a man out there, somewhere,
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who looks a little bit like the actor Idris Elba,
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or at least he did 20 years ago.
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I don't know anything else about him,
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except that he once saved my life
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by putting his own life in danger.
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This man ran across four lanes of freeway traffic in the middle of the night
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to bring me back to safety
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after a car accident that could have killed me.
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And the whole thing left me really shaken up, obviously,
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but it also left me with this kind of burning, gnawing need
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to understand why he did it,
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what forces within him caused him to make the choice
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that I owe my life to,
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to risk his own life to save the life of a stranger?
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In other words, what are the causes of his or anybody else's capacity for altruism?
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But first let me tell you what happened.
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That night, I was 19 years old
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and driving back to my home in Tacoma, Washington,
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down the Interstate 5 freeway,
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when a little dog darted out in front of my car.
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And I did exactly what you're not supposed to do,
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which is swerve to avoid it.
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And I discovered why you're not supposed to do that.
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I hit the dog anyways,
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and that sent the car into a fishtail,
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and then a spin across the freeway,
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until finally it wound up in the fast lane of the freeway
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faced backwards into oncoming traffic
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and then the engine died.
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And I was sure in that moment that I was about to die too,
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but I didn't
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because of the actions of that one brave man
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who must have made the decision
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within a fraction of a second of seeing my stranded car
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to pull over and run across four lanes of freeway traffic
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in the dark
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to save my life.
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And then after he got my car working again
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and got me back to safety and made sure I was going to be all right,
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he drove off again.
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He never even told me his name,
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and I'm pretty sure I forgot to say thank you.
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So before I go any further,
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I really want to take a moment
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to stop and say thank you to that stranger.
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(Applause)
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I tell you all of this
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because the events of that night changed the course of my life to some degree.
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I became a psychology researcher,
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and I've devoted my work to understanding the human capacity to care for others.
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Where does it come from, and how does it develop,
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and what are the extreme forms that it can take?
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These questions are really important to understanding basic aspects
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of human social nature.
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A lot of people, and this includes everybody
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from philosophers and economists to ordinary people
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believe that human nature is fundamentally selfish,
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that we're only ever really motivated by our own welfare.
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But if that's true, why do some people, like the stranger who rescued me,
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do selfless things, like helping other people
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at enormous risk and cost to themselves?
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Answering this question
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requires exploring the roots of extraordinary acts of altruism,
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and what might make people who engage in such acts
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different than other people.
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But until recently, very little work on this topic had been done.
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The actions of the man who rescued me
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meet the most stringent definition of altruism,
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which is a voluntary, costly behavior
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motivated by the desire to help another individual.
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So it's a selfless act intended to benefit only the other.
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What could possibly explain an action like that?
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One answer is compassion, obviously,
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which is a key driver of altruism.
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But then the question becomes,
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why do some people seem to have more of it than others?
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And the answer may be that the brains of highly altruistic people
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are different in fundamental ways.
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But to figure out how,
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I actually started from the opposite end,
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with psychopaths.
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A common approach to understanding basic aspects of human nature,
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like the desire to help other people,
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is to study people in whom that desire is missing,
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and psychopaths are exactly such a group.
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Psychopathy is a developmental disorder
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with strongly genetic origins,
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and it results in a personality that's cold and uncaring
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and a tendency to engage in antisocial and sometimes very violent behavior.
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Once my colleagues and I at the National Institute of Mental Health
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conducted some of the first ever brain imaging research
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of psychopathic adolescents,
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and our findings, and the findings of other researchers now,
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have shown that people who are psychopathic
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pretty reliably exhibit three characteristics.
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First, although they're not generally insensitive to other people's emotions,
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they are insensitive to signs that other people are in distress.
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And in particular,
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they have difficulty recognizing fearful facial expressions like this one.
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And fearful expressions convey urgent need and emotional distress,
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and they usually elicit compassion and a desire to help
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in people who see them,
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so it makes sense that people who tend to lack compassion
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also tend to be insensitive to these cues.
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The part of the brain
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that's the most important for recognizing fearful expressions
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is called the amygdala.
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There are very rare cases of people who lack amygdalas completely,
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and they're profoundly impaired in recognizing fearful expressions.
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And whereas healthy adults and children
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usually show big spikes in amygdala activity
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when they look at fearful expressions,
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psychopaths' amygdalas are underreactive to these expressions.
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Sometimes they don't react at all,
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which may be why they have trouble detecting these cues.
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Finally, psychopaths' amygdalas are smaller than average
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by about 18 or 20 percent.
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So all of these findings are reliable and robust,
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and they're very interesting.
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But remember that my main interest
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is not understanding why people don't care about others.
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It's understanding why they do.
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So the real question is,
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could extraordinary altruism,
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which is the opposite of psychopathy
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in terms of compassion and the desire to help other people,
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emerge from a brain that is also the opposite of psychopathy?
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A sort of antipsychopathic brain,
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better able to recognize other people's fear,
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an amygdala that's more reactive to this expression
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and maybe larger than average as well?
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As my research has now shown,
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all three things are true.
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And we discovered this
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by testing a population of truly extraordinary altruists.
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These are people who have given one of their own kidneys
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to a complete stranger.
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So these are people who have volunteered to undergo major surgery
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so that one of their own healthy kidneys can be removed
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and transplanted into a very ill stranger
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that they've never met and may never meet.
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"Why would anybody do this?" is a very common question.
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And the answer may be
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that the brains of these extraordinary altruists
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have certain special characteristics.
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They are better at recognizing other people's fear.
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They're literally better at detecting when somebody else is in distress.
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This may be in part because their amygdala is more reactive to these expressions.
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And remember, this is the same part of the brain that we found
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was underreactive in people who are psychopathic.
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And finally, their amygdalas are larger than average as well,
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by about eight percent.
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So together, what these data suggest
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is the existence of something like a caring continuum in the world
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that's anchored at the one end by people who are highly psychopathic,
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and at the other by people who are very compassionate
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and driven to acts of extreme altruism.
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But I should add that what makes extraordinary altruists so different
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is not just that they're more compassionate than average.
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They are,
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but what's even more unusual about them
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is that they're compassionate and altruistic
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not just towards people who are in their own innermost circle
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of friends and family. Right?
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Because to have compassion for people that you love and identify with
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is not extraordinary.
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Truly extraordinary altruists' compassion extends way beyond that circle,
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even beyond their wider circle of acquaintances
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to people who are outside their social circle altogether,
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total strangers,
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just like the man who rescued me.
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And I've had the opportunity now to ask a lot of altruistic kidney donors
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how it is that they manage to generate such a wide circle of compassion
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that they were willing to give a complete stranger their kidney.
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And I found it's a really difficult question for them to answer.
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I say, "How is it that you're willing to do this thing
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when so many other people don't?
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You're one of fewer than 2,000 Americans
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who has ever given a kidney to a stranger.
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What is it that makes you so special?"
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And what do they say?
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They say, "Nothing.
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There's nothing special about me.
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I'm just the same as everybody else."
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And I think that's actually a really telling answer,
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because it suggests that the circles of these altruists don't look like this,
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they look more like this.
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They have no center.
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These altruists literally don't think of themselves
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as being at the center of anything,
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as being better or more inherently important than anybody else.
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When I asked one altruist why donating her kidney made sense to her,
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she said, "Because it's not about me."
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Another said,
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"I'm not different. I'm not unique.
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Your study here is going to find out that I'm just the same as you."
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I think the best description for this amazing lack of self-centeredness
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is humility,
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which is that quality that in the words of St. Augustine
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makes men as angels.
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And why is that?
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It's because if there's no center of your circle,
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there can be no inner rings or outer rings,
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nobody who is more or less worthy of your care and compassion
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than anybody else.
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And I think that this is what really distinguishes extraordinary altruists
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from the average person.
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But I also think that this is a view of the world that's attainable by many
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and maybe even most people.
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And I think this because at the societal level,
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expansions of altruism and compassion are already happening everywhere.
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The psychologist Steven Pinker and others have shown
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that all around the world people are becoming less and less accepting
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of suffering in ever-widening circles of others,
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which has led to declines of all kinds of cruelty and violence,
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from animal abuse to domestic violence to capital punishment.
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And it's led to increases in all kinds of altruism.
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A hundred years ago, people would have thought it was ludicrous
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how normal and ordinary it is
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for people to donate their blood and bone marrow
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to complete strangers today.
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Is it possible that a hundred years from now
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people will think that donating a kidney to a stranger
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is just as normal and ordinary
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as we think donating blood and bone marrow is today?
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Maybe.
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So what's at the root of all these amazing changes?
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In part it seems to be
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increases in wealth and standards of living.
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As societies become wealthier and better off,
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people seem to turn their focus of attention outward,
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and as a result, all kinds of altruism towards strangers increases,
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from volunteering to charitable donations and even altruistic kidney donations.
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But all of these changes also yield
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a strange and paradoxical result,
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which is that even as the world is becoming a better and more humane place,
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which it is,
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there's a very common perception that it's becoming worse
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and more cruel, which it's not.
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And I don't know exactly why this is,
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but I think it may be that we now just know so much more
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about the suffering of strangers in distant places,
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and so we now care a lot more
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about the suffering of those distant strangers.
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But what's clear is the kinds of changes we're seeing show
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that the roots of altruism and compassion
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are just as much a part of human nature as cruelty and violence,
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maybe even more so,
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and while some people do seem to be inherently more sensitive
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to the suffering of distant others,
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I really believe that the ability to remove oneself
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from the center of the circle