Electric Shock Study Suggests We'd Rather Hurt Ourselves Than Others

sciencehabit writes: If you had the choice between hurting yourself or someone else in exchange for money, how altruistic do you think you'd be? In one infamous experiment, people were quite willing to deliver painful shocks to anonymous victims when asked by a scientist. But a new study that forced people into the dilemma of choosing between pain and profit finds that participants cared more about other people's well-being than their own. It is hailed as the first hard evidence of altruism for the young field of behavioral economics.

Comments

This study is...

[danknight48]

Shocking.

Needs larger sample set.

[Narcocide]

My guess is these were all volunteers participating in the study "for science?"

My guess is that introduces a selection bias towards altruism. Test any of the several thousand people I've worked for, with, or very near over the past 20 years and I would guess that most of them wouldn't hesitate to shock the other person as much as was allowed, especially if they could be relatively certain the other person could not shock them back as a direct response.

Re:Needs larger sample set.

[west]

No, I've worked for all sorts of organizations, from large to small.

It's not that people are all saints, but I've found that overwhelmingly, people want to do good, especially if it isn't going to cost them deeply.

I have seen (didn't work at, but visited) companies that squished that tendency by making it quite costly to help one's fellow employee, and they were miserable places for the workers, but even there people tended to hate the company for making being helpful costly, rather than their coworkers for not helping (although I'll admit it did leak a little bit. Very sad place.)

In any place I've worked at, I've gone out of my way to be helpful to others, and every one else has gone out of their way to be helpful to me.

Perhaps I've just been very fortunate. Maybe I tend to see the best in people. But I will say that my observations on people's basic helpfulness have been borne out time and time again over the last 40+ years. I still take delight in the random acts of kindness and helpfulness that I see time and time again at work, the community and on buses and subways.

I'm still in awe of observing how it took perhaps a total of 30 seconds for a random women to notice on the subway when a young girl got separated from her grandmother and panicked when the doors closed too quickly, call for volunteers, and then organize four of them to go to the previous station, authorities, etc. (turning away 2 or 3 others including myself) before the subway reached the next stop.

Another example: My older teen-age son got into a verbal altercation on a bus because a young man started loudly swearing at my younger son when the my youngest accidentally hit the fellow with the backpack he was wearing. The older son verbally stepped in to redirect the ire onto himself to prevent his brother from being alarmed by the man's behaviour.

A month later, my son, waiting for a bus in the same neighborhood (which is a bit downscale) was approached by the same young man. The young man came up and apologized. He'd had a bad day when my youngest backpack bounced against him. He then praised my oldest for intervening to protect his younger brother.

That sort of good-heartedness is all around. Yeah, there are a few jerks. But there are a lot of people, who despite the occasional bad behaviour, are generally good. (I've always been grateful for the gentleman in the above example who apologized. It taught may son that people who are behaving badly aren't "bad to the bone", but are probably just having a bad day, same as the rest of us. A *critical* truth for bringing out the best in people.)

Yeah, I've lost a few bucks to a fraudulent "help me", but such incidents have been outweighed by orders of magnitude (literally) by the fact that almost no-one wants to be a jerk, and given the opportunity, most people are decent.

Again, you have my sympathies for living in a section of the world where that isn't true.

And sorry for the length of the post, but your vision of humanity was so horrifying that I felt I needed to point out the sentiment is far from universal.

The old woman said:

[Mantrid42]

“You’ve heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There’s an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.”

Re:How much money ?

[Your.Master]

The article has a bit more info.

Spoiler alert: the shock is calibrated to each person to be "painful but not intolerable", and it's about 30 cents a shock for yourself or 60 cents a shock to others.

There may be an initial threshold -- my understanding is that the question would be something like:

"Would you rather be shocked 10 times and get $7 or shocked 20 times and get $9", or "Would you rather be shocked 5 times for $5 or have this chick get shocked 3 times for $4", not necessarily giving a 0 shocks = $0 option.

Re:How much money ?

[worf_mo]

If the alternative is to give someone else one and cash in on it...

Never was a username more opportune...