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Across cultures human beings exhibit an instinct to help others
I thought that one driving premise of economic theory is that human beings are primarily selfish?!
Well, that’s going back a few years — or decades. We know that human beings are very cooperative but some of this cooperation differs between cultures. What’s more a lot of research into cooperation and collaboration looks at big ticket items like sharing food or other resources.
So what did this research look at?
This is more fascinating because this international research team looked at more often overlooked acts of help and kindness. Things like opening a door, passing an object, helping pick something up, and so on.
But of course we help with things like that!
That’s precisely the point — if you say “of course” then this suggests that this is natural, it’s inbuilt, it’s default human nature. Big ticket items are big, less common, and carry much more wight also in terms of invested resources. They also develop their own cultural norms around them so then it become hard to find correlations between cultures.
Right, and so what did the researchers find — are human beings nicer than we often portray?
