In the seconds after the explosions came an answer to an ancient question: Are we by nature good, or bad?
At 2:50 PM on Monday, April 15, I was sitting in my Cambridge office,
separated from the finish line of the Boston Marathon by 2.5 miles of
parks, city streets, and the iconic Charles River. Around 3:00 PM, I
started receiving what would soon become a flood of messages—texts,
emails, and Facebook chats, from friends, family members, and
high-school classmates: “Are you ok?” “Are you safe?” “You’re not at the
marathon, are you?”
This is how I learned
what else happened at 2:50 PM. This is how I learned that mere miles away, two home-made bombs had detonated, killing three people and wounding
183 more.
And this is what led me to pace the halls of my building, knocking on
every door; to contact, in any way possible, friends I knew were there,
at
that finish line; to make sure that these people—
my people—were safe.
In times of distress and unease—of apparent attack—it’s easy to think in us-vs-them terms: to care only about
our people,
our city,
our country.
But if these attacks were perpetrated against any “us,” it was the “us” of humankind. The
official list
of marathon participants includes more than 23,000 athletes: males and
females ranging in age from 18 to 83; runners, handcyclists, and
wheelchair operators; citizens of 96 different countries and 6 of 7
continents (only Antarctica—
which is not home to any permanent human residents—was not represented). They were us. And they were diverse.
The bombs exploded at a site celebrating this magnificent
diversity—along the home stretch of the Marathon, a section of Boylston
Street lined with the flags of each participant’s native country. This
diversity was also displayed by the injured, and the
dead—an 8-year-old boy, a 29-year-old restaurant manager, a 23-year-old Chinese graduate student.
This was, and is, a tragedy. There is no denying it.
But in the midst of this tragedy, there also was—and is—an unmistakable beauty.
In the immediate aftermath of the explosions—even as debris continued to
fly through the air—countless people ran not away from the blasts, but
towards them.
These people had no way of knowing whether or not there would be more
explosions, no way of knowing whether or not they were putting their own
lives in danger; they simply saw others in need and immediately rushed
to help. At the same time, more people—many of them marathoners who had
just completed a draining 26.2 mile test of endurance—began to rush en
masse to nearby Massachusetts General Hospital, seeking to give their
own blood for the hundreds of wounded that would soon follow. In fact,
so many people showed up that the hospital was forced, multiple times,
to turn away would-be donors; there were simply
too many people trying to help.
These overwhelming displays of helping—of selflessness and what psychologists call “
prosocial behavior”—are
beautiful in and of themselves. But they are even more beautiful
because they transcend us-vs-them ways of thinking. These actions were
not reserved for members of one group, one city, or one country; they
were enacted without preference or prejudice, directed at victims of
every color, creed, age, and gender. And they are still
more
beautiful because of their immediacy. These actions were not the result
of carefully considered decisions, of weighing the pros and cons of
each possible behavior; they were virtually instantaneous, seemingly
born of a raw, instinctive urge to help those in need. In the face of
overwhelming tragedy, people sought to help the “us” of
humankind—immediately, prodigiously, and with little regard for their
own safety.
A long tradition of research in social and
evolutionary psychology tells us that this behavior doesn’t make sense. That
people operate according to fundamentally selfish instincts, and that these selfish instincts can be found in every organism, every cell, and
every gene.
According to this tradition, thinking of any “us” at all can be
explained as a means to the end of preserving one’s own physical and
psychological well-being, living to see another day, and producing
children that have a reasonable chance of doing the same. Ostensibly
altruistic behaviors—everything from sharing resources to laying down
one’s life to save others—can be explained by fundamentally selfish
motives like
reputational concerns (the desire to be seen in a positive light),
kin selection (the desire to preserve one’s genetic material, sometimes even at the cost of one’s own life), or simply a desire to
ease the personal discomfort that comes along with viewing others in distress. In short, people help others to help themselves.
But other research tells a different story. When people find “lost” letters on the sidewalk,
they tend to mail them to the intended recipients,
even though this good deed will receive no recognition or reward, does
nothing to further their own genetic legacy, and probably does not
relieve much personal distress. People make anonymous financial
donations, and as many as 32% are even
willing to anonymously donate their own internal organs—while still living—to complete strangers. Even
children who are four years old spontaneously help others
with no apparent concern for approval from friends and/or authority
figures, personal benefits, or moral (good/bad) imperatives. Examples
such as these provide a counterargument to the selfish view of human
nature that has long dominated psychological research. They suggest
that people may help others with little or no thought for their own
well-being; people may help others simply because they need to be
helped.
Of course, it could be that these heartwarming actions can also be
explained by selfish motives, ones that are simply more difficult to pin
down. Or it could be that these actions represent the outcome of
hard-fought battles pitting conscious control against selfish core
impulses—victories for virtue, yes, but ones that require continuous
effort and are likely to be surrendered as soon as people are unable or
unwilling to continue overriding their selfish impulses. It could be
that when caring for others threatens people’s own welfare, they will
retreat into increasingly smaller
moral circles—from caring for the “us” of humankind to the “us” of their families, friends, and
ingroup members;
from caring about this restricted “us” to only caring about
themselves. It could be that, when people are put to the ultimate test,
self-preservation will always win out.
The Boston Marathon bombings put people to this test. The attack created chaos,
pain,
and destruction; it destroyed lives and landscapes. It destroyed
pretense. Those on the scene were immediately forced to face the
jarring reality of those who had already been injured—a reality that
represented both these victims’ need for help and the possibility that
providing help could result in personal injury from further explosions.
In this situation, people had neither the time nor the resources to
override impulses or think strategically; they could only react,
behaving intuitively and emotionally.
It is in these reactions that I see beauty. In the initial movements of
the helpers—the first responders, the blood donators, the countless men
and women who rushed in to do anything and everything they could to fix
the gaping hole left by those Monday afternoon explosions—I see an
extreme example of the human capacity for selflessness. I see evidence
that people tend to intuitively, instinctively, and perhaps
automatically reach out to others in times of need. I see that extreme
situations can cause people to transcend us-vs-them thinking, uniting
diverse peoples into the “us” of humankind.
In the few days since the bombings, the
intervening events—
continued loss of life, a night filled with
sirens and shootouts, a day spent in “
lockdown,”
the capture of a 19-year-old, and the heartfelt displays of
appreciation for law enforcement—have
threatened to prematurely relegate the explosions on Boylston Street to
the past. Similarly, the delayed reactions of some—
actively seeking a “
them”
to set up in opposition to “us”—have threatened to overshadow the
immediate and selfless reactions shown by those at the scene. Taken
together, these actions and reactions show that people are complex,
confusing, and often self-contradictory. However, they also highlight
the immense capacity for human goodness present in the midst of this
complexity.
They offer the hope, at least, that
the good in people will always overcome the bad.
Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive
science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper
that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind
Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist at the
Boston Globe. He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Adrian F. Ward
is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Psychology at Harvard
University. His research focuses on morality, social networks,
decision-making, memory, and technology.
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