ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Neural and cognitive characteristics of extraordinary altruists.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 66 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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66 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 196 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Neural responses underlying extraordinary altruists' generosity for socially distant others.PNAS nexus · 2023Article
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- Unselfish traits and social decision-making patterns characterize six populations of real-world extraordinary altruists.Nature communications · 2023Article
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6 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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6 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Altruistic behavior improves the welfare of another individual while reducing the altruist's welfare. Humans' tendency to engage in altruistic behaviors is unevenly distributed across the population, and individual variation in altruistic tendencies may be genetically mediated. Although neural endophenotypes of heightened or extreme antisocial behavior tendencies have been identified in, for example, studies of psychopaths, little is known about the neural mechanisms that support heightened or extreme prosocial or altruistic tendencies. In this study, we used structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess a population of extraordinary altruists: altruistic kidney donors who volunteered to donate a kidney to a stranger. Such donations meet the most stringent definitions of altruism in that they represent an intentional behavior that incurs significant costs to the donor to benefit an anonymous, nonkin other. Functional imaging and behavioral tasks included face-emotion processing paradigms that reliably distinguish psychopathic individuals from controls. Here we show that extraordinary altruists can be distinguished from controls by their enhanced volume in right amygdala and enhanced responsiveness of this structure to fearful facial expressions, an effect that predicts superior perceptual sensitivity to these expressions. These results mirror the reduced amygdala volume and reduced responsiveness to fearful facial expressions observed in psychopathic individuals. Our results support the possibility of a neural basis for extraordinary altruism. We anticipate that these findings will expand the scope of research on biological mechanisms that promote altruistic behaviors to include neural mechanisms that support affective and social responsiveness.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.