Pathological Altruism
ALMOST EVERYONE agrees that selfishness comes in benign and pathological forms, which are distinguished by qualifiers such as “enlightened self-interest.” When it comes to altruism, however, it is common to think that only good can come from it. I experienced this for myself when I coedited a book titled Pathological Altruism with Barbara Oakley, Ariel Knafo, and Guruprasad Madhavan.1 People who encountered the title before reading the book often acted offended, as if we were committing an act of sacrilege. Had we mysteriously been converted to the creed of Ayn Rand?
Not in the least. The fact that altruism can have both benign and pathological outcomes follows from evolutionary theory at an elementary level. If the concept of pathological altruism clashes with the way that most people think about altruism, then that illustrates the novelty of evolutionary thinking against the background of received wisdom.
Adaptations are seldom categorically good. They contribute to survival and reproduction in some environments, which can be benign, but not others, which can be pathological. Even this statement must be qualified with the word “can,” because adaptations in the evolutionary sense of the word are not necessarily benign in the everyday sense of the word. Adaptations can be good for me but bad for you; good for us but bad for them; or good for me, us, and them over the short term but not the long term. These general points apply to altruism as well as any other adaptation.
In chapter 8 I compared the spatial distribution of prosociality in the city of Binghamton to the spatial distribution of a plant species. No one would try to expand the range of the plant species without providing the appropriate growth conditions, but people are urged to behave prosocially all the time without much thought about the conditions that are required to sustain it in a Darwinian world. In some of our Evolution Institute workshops, we have started to call this “declawing the cat.”2 Cats need their claws, especially alley cats, and declawing them only benefits their clawed competitors. People inhabiting harsh social environments similarly need to protect themselves and often have no recourse but to live at the expense of other people. Counseling them to abandon these survival and reproductive strategies without altering their social environment will be either ineffective, if they have enough sense to ignore the advice, or will harm them without providing long-term benefits to anyone else. That’s pathological.
I had an opportunity to study the benign and pathological manifestations of altruism in a collaborative project with psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who is best known for his book Flow, which is about the experience of being totally immersed in what one is doing. We were able to retrofit a large nationwide study that he and sociologist Barbara Schneider conducted on how American high school students prepare themselves for the workplace.3 Using the many questionnaire items that the students were asked, we were able to assign a PROSOCIALITY score for each student, much as I did for the Developmental Assets Profile described in the previous chapter. Among the other questionnaire items, the students were asked whether they had experienced a number of stressful events during the previous two years, such as witnessing a violent crime, being assaulted, or being shot at (the sample size was sufficiently large that over 150 students reported being shot at). High-PROs were less likely to experience these events than Low-PROs, which makes sense, given what we have learned about High-PROs clustering together. When High-PROs did experience these events, however, they reported feeling more stressed than low-PROs who experienced the same events. Their “niche” was to avoid such tactics altogether, and they were poorly adapted to “niches” where such tactics were commonly employed.
Pathological Altruism provides an inventory of psychological dysfunctions and material hazards that high-PROs are likely to experience when they find themselves outside their niche. High-PROs are prone to feeling guilty at the misfortune of others, even when it is not their fault, leading to depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and obsessive-compulsion disorder.4 Empathy can trap people in codependent relationships that are highly dysfunctional.5 Eating disorders can result as much from a desire to sacrifice one’s own needs for the sake of others as from a desire to conform to cultural standards of beauty.6 Even the most prosocial person can experience burnout in high-need situations, such as caring for terminally ill patients.7
One of the most detailed and nuanced analyses of pathological altruism comes from Barbara Oakley, lead editor of the Pathological Altruism volume, in a book titled Cold-Blooded Kindness.8 Just as murder has been used to reflect upon the human condition in great works of literature such as Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Barbara brought the scientific knowledge that we were assembling in Pathological Altruism to bear upon a murder committed by an artist, animal lover, and mother of five named Carole Alden, who phoned the police to say she had killed her husband in self-defense. Oakley was drawn to study this particular case because it seemed like a classic example of spousal abuse. According to the press reports, Alden was a woman who was too kind for her own good, whose need to help others was so strong that she became easy prey for a social predator. This would be one pathological outcome of altruism, but when Oakley dug into the case, she discovered something more complex, dark, and interesting. In many respects, Alden had turned victimhood into an art form. She was the predator and the man she killed was not her only victim.
The actual facts of the case illustrate another pathological outcome of altruism—codependency—in which the desire to help others contributes to a mutually destructive relationship, even ending in a death spiral. There is no clear victim or victimizer in a mutually destructive relationship because each person plays a role in its maintenance. It is not as simple as a predator grasping a prey that is struggling to get away.
Another pathology detailed by Oakley in Cold-Blooded Kindness is the murder of objective truth-seeking by passionate advocacy. One might think that an issue as important as spousal abuse would receive the most careful attention that science has to offer, but the crusade to raise consciousness about the issue has led to a black-and-white view of victims and victimizers that does not admit shades of gray. Thus, the authentic scientific study of mutually destructive relationships is only beginning and much remains to be learned. Oakley’s inquiry stands in refreshing contrast to well-meaning but misguided crusaders.
Finally, it might seem that a scientific diagnosis of a murder would lack compassion, but nothing could be further from the truth. The picture that emerges from Cold-Blooded Kindness is that everyone is trying to survive as best they can, surrounded by kith and kin who love them no matter how badly they stumble. Anyone can become lost in a maze of unforeseen consequences, high-PROs and low-PROs alike. Some of those most closely associated with the case have thanked Oakley for helping them achieve a kind of closure that had previously eluded them.
Even when altruism and other forms of prosociality work as intended, resulting in efficacious groups whose members provide benefits for each other, these groups can do harm to other groups or to the larger society within which they are embedded. The iron law of multilevel selection is that adaptation at any given level of a multitier hierarchy requires a process of selection at that level and tends to be undermined by selection at lower levels. In other words, everything pathological associated with individual selfishness also characterizes altruism at intermediate levels of a multitier hierarchy. My individual selfishness can be bad for my family, but family-level altruism can be bad for the clan, clan-level altruism can be bad for the nation, and nation-level altruism can be bad for the global village.
Small groups have an especially strong grip on our allegiance, which makes sense given our long evolutionary history in small groups. In a study of Machiavellianism, an axis of individual difference related to prosociality, subjects performed a task with a partner who was a confederate of the experiment and who encouraged the subject to collaborate in cheating. The participants could resist cheating at a variety of levels: by attempting to stop their partner, by terminating the experiment, by reporting their partner to the experimenter, or by quickly confessing when the experimenter became suspicious at the end of the experiment. In fact, nearly all participants allowed themselves to become implicated in the unethical act, regardless of their degree of Machiavellianism. The impulse to collaborate with one’s immediate social partner—even in an ephemeral social interaction with a stranger—trumped higher-level considerations.9 The same phenomenon is observed in children who refuse to tell on each other and reserve a special form of contempt for those who do.
In a classic longitudinal study of deviance, thirteen-year-old boys were videotaped while talking with a friend.10 Laughing about deviant behavior was highly predictive of actual deviant behavior several years later. In another classic study, families with children at risk for deviant behavior were randomly assigned to a number of intervention treatments that involved working with the parents or their children in groups. Teaching the parents how to reinforce good behavior in their children was somewhat successful, but meeting with the children in groups perversely increased the level of deviant behavior measured a year later. You guessed it: The kids positively reinforced each other for deviancy, which outweighed the instruction that the adults were trying to provide. Any intervention program that involves bringing deviant individuals together in groups—and there are thousands of them—is liable to make the problem worse.
Other examples of prosociality at one level of a multitier social hierarchy becoming part of the problem at higher levels can be recited almost without end. A classic ethnography of a large corporation titled Moral Mazes by sociologist Robert Jackall details how competition among individuals, alliances, and divisions within the corporation undermines the goals of the corporation as a whole.11 Even if a large corporation can manage to function well as a collective unit, there is no guarantee that it will contribute to the welfare of the larger economic system of which it is a part.
A novel titled No Longer at Ease by the African author Chinua Achebe sensitively analyzes the phenomenon of corruption through the eyes of an idealistic young man in government service who is full of patriotic fervor for his young nation of Nigeria.12 Nevertheless, he owes his position to his village, which scrimped and saved to send him to England for his education. As far as his village is concerned, he is supposed to benefit them, regardless of other villages or the nation as a whole. When he becomes guilty of corruption, it is not because he is individually selfish, but because he is obeying the moral dictates of a lower-level social unit. Some nations have managed to solve these internal problems better than others, thereby functioning better as corporate units—but their leaders talk unabashedly about pursuing the national interest, as if blissfully unaware of the dysfunctions that nation-level selfishness can produce at the level of the global village.
In chapter 7 we encountered the so-called first fundamental theorem of welfare economics: “Laissez-faire leads to the common good.” The idea that anything like a mathematical proof exists for this proposition, outside the fantasy worlds of neoclassical economics and market fundamentalism, would be funny if it weren’t taken so seriously. On the other hand, multilevel selection does have the generality that warrants a term such as theorem or law. In some respects, the law is cause for despair, because it reveals the need for coordination and protection against exploitation at scales that have never existed in human history. In other respects, the law is cause for optimism, because it provides the conceptual resources for achieving functional organization at the planetary scale.