Pathological Altruism [Hardcover]

Barbara Oakley (Editor), Ariel Knafo (Editor), Guruprasad Madhavan (Editor), David Sloan Wilson (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 19, 2011 | ISBN-10: 0199738572 | ISBN-13: 978-0199738571 | Edition: 1

The benefits of altruism and empathy are obvious. These qualities are so highly regarded and embedded in both secular and religious societies that it seems almost heretical to suggest they can cause harm. Like most good things, however, altruism can be distorted or taken to an unhealthy extreme. Pathological Altruism presents a number of new, thought-provoking theses that explore a range of hurtful effects of altruism and empathy.

Pathologies of empathy, for example, may trigger depression as well as the burnout seen in healthcare professionals. The selflessness of patients with eating abnormalities forms an important aspect of those disorders. Hyperempathy - an excess of concern for what others think and how they feel - helps explain popular but poorly defined concepts such as codependency. In fact, pathological altruism, in the form of an unhealthy focus on others to the detriment of one's own needs, may underpin some personality disorders.

Pathologies of altruism and empathy not only underlie health issues, but also a disparate slew of humankind's most troubled features, including genocide, suicide bombing, self-righteous political partisanship, and ineffective philanthropic and social programs that ultimately worsen the situations they are meant to aid. Pathological Altruism is a groundbreaking new book - the first to explore the negative aspects of altruism and empathy, seemingly uniformly positive traits. The contributing authors provide a scientific, social, and cultural foundation for the subject of pathological altruism, creating a new field of inquiry. Each author's approach points to one disturbing truth: what we value so much, the altruistic "good" side of human nature, can also have a dark side that we ignore at our peril.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A scholarly yet surprisingly sprightly volume...The book is the first comprehensive treatment of the idea that when ostensibly generous 'how can I help you?' behavior is taken to extremes, misapplied or stridently rhapsodized, it can become unhelpful, unproductive and even destructive."
--Natalie Angier, The New York Times

"What a wonderful book! This is one of the few books in evolutionary biology I've read in the past ten years that taught me something completely new."
-Edward O. Wilson, Pulitzer Prize Winner and Pellegrino University Research Professor Emeritus, Harvard University

"The coverage of topics is breathtaking.... The reader will emerge with a much deeper and nuanced understanding of altruism in reading this book, the best on altruism in the last 15 years."
-Dacher Keltner, Professor of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley; author of Born To Be Good: The Science of A Meaningful Life

"This unique volume manages the impressive feat of pulling together the best research from psychology, genetics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and law on well-meaning but ultimately harmful forms of self-sacrifice. It will forever change the way you look at altruism."
-Sharon Begley, Science Editor, Newsweek, and author of Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain

"An essential reading for anyone who truly cares about helping others."
-Paul Zak, Professor of Economics, Claremont Graduate University, and co-editor of Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy

"What is grand about the collection is that light pours in through every contribution, and even the glare of competing views can reveal dark assumptions."
-Robert J. Richards, Morris Fishbein Professor of Science and Medicine, The University of Chicago, and author of Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (winner of the Pfizer Prize in History of Science)

"This volume is unique in examining 'pathological altruism' from various angles with unfailing insight and depth."
-Elkhonon Goldberg, Clinical Professor of Neurology, New York University School of Medicine, and author of The New Executive Brain,The Wisdom Paradox, and The Executive Brain

'''Be careful what you wish for' might be one way of summing up the take-home message of this strikingly original book, highlighting the fact that 'more is not always better' when it comes to either being the altruist or the recipient of altruism."
-Jay Belsky, Professor of Pyschology; Birkbeck University of London

"Is pathological altruism a disease, an addiction, an evolutionary relic, or perhaps a mirage? This is a wonderfully engaging and thought provoking book; you may not agree with all of its arguments, but you'll never look at kindness quite the same way again."
-Oren Harman, Chair of the Graduate Program in Science, Technology and Society, Bar Ilan University, Israel, and author of The Price of Altruism

"It is rare-actually, probably unprecedented-to find in a single volume discussions of the moral right to sell one's kidney, of friends who enable an alcoholic's benders out of a misplaced sense of empathy, of people who hoard animals (the not-at-all apocryphal crazy neighbor who lives with 87 cats), of the psychological motivations of suicide bombers, of the genetics of individualism and collectivism, and of the frequent failings of well-intentioned foreign aid programs. This is that rare, if not unique, volume. It manages the impressive feat of pulling together the best research from psychology, genetics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and law on well-meaning but ultimately harmful forms of self-sacrifice. It will forever change the way you look at altruism." --Sharon Begley, Science Editor, Newsweek, and author of Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain

"Can there be too much of a good thing? Surely, eating too many chocolate chip cookies will lead to a sore stomach, but too much altruism bringing about harm?! In Pathological Altruism, experts in diverse fields consider the phenomenon of radical altruism, from battered women to suicide martyrs, and from autistic people to foreign aid givers, and all the way to Mahatma Gandhi. Is pathological altruism a disease, an addiction, an evolutionary relic, or perhaps a mirage? This is a wonderfully engaging and thought provoking book: you may not agree with all of its arguments, but you'll never look at kindness quite the same way again." --Oren Harman, Chair of the Graduate Program in Science, Technology and Society at Bar Ilan University, Israel, and author of The Price of Altruism

"WOW-what a book! Can one be too nice? In this fascinating volume Barbara Oakley and her collaborators show how altruism can bleed into misplaced, excessive, self-righteous, or self-serving pathologies. Why this occurs and its societal implications make this book essential reading for anyone who truly cares about helping others." --Paul Zak, Professor of Economics and Director, Center for Neuroeconomics Studies, Claremont Graduate University, co-editor of Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy

"Pathological altruism? Sounds like an oxymoron, but this fascinating book quickly convinces you that altruism can go seriously mad and bad. The great breadth and quality of contributors to this book from psychiatry, psychology, and philosophy - and that's just the 'P's' - shed light on the dark side of our evolutionary propensity towards altruism, which can be subverted to a wide range of pathologies such as survivor guilt, drug co-dependency, personality disorders, and eating disorders. When within-group altruism is exploited to between-group hostility, it can lead to suicide martyrdom and genocide." --Robert Plomin, MRC Research Professor and Deputy Director, Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London; author of Behavioral Genetics (now in its 5th edition), and past-president of the Behavior Genetics Association

"What most of us perceive as unmitigated evil, its perpetrators sometimes regard as self-sacrifice in the name of some delusional cause. Suicide bombers, terrorists, messianic cult leaders guiding their following to self-destruction usually think of their heinous acts as benefiting humanity at the cost of self-deprecation. So did Adolf Hitler. To understand such behaviors, it is necessary to understand 'pathological altruism' in its many manifestations. This volume is unique in examining 'pathological altruism' from various angles with unfailing insight and depth. The book will be an invaluable source for psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, historians, criminologists, as well as fascinating reading for the general educated public." --Elkhonon Goldberg, Clinical Professor of Neurology, New York University School of Medicine and author of New Executive Brain, Wisdom Paradox, and Executive Brain

"Read this book. You will learn much that would be new to you, whatever your expertise or interest. And I would be surprised if you don't enjoy this voyage of discovery."
-Francisco J. Ayala, Templeton Prize Laureate and University Professor, University of California, Irvine

"It will lead the way for future investigators and scientists to open the doors of inquiry into a new and most interesting field of inquiry. It is well done, reader friendly, and highly praised by leaders in the scientific and educational communities. I will add my praise to those and recommend it highly." -- Lois Bennett, Ph.D., New York Journal of Books

"Overall, this is a well-written, easily comprehensible collection of typological (epidemiological) investigations into "altruism's gloomy underbelly" (p. 7)asserting that "some people are pathological altruists in their essence" (Krueger, p. 298). From its seemingly oxymoronic title to the final chapter, the content flows logically in a coherent, clear, and convincing presentation of all aspects of altruism. Ultimately, the book adds to the growing scientific examination of empathy and prosocial behavior. It is a must read for clinicians and researchers interested in these fields." -- Lora Humphrey Beebe, PhD, Issues in Mental Health Nursing

"Apparently not, at least for a lot of people. One of the best pieces in Pathological Altruism is David Brin's chapter on addiction to indignation: "Self-addiction and Self-righteousness." You might see why looking to feel outraged as often as you can is pathological, but how could overweening, self-righteous huffiness ever be described as altruistic?" -- Los Angeles Review of Books

"This book offers a well-balanced sense of how altruistic acts can cause harm to the self, to
any intended target(s), and to society at large. Although not organized into these categories,
Pathological Altruism highlights the problems that can emerge when personal, civic, and
civil agendas are left unchallenged." -- PsycCRITIQUES

About the Author

Barbara Oakley is an associate professor of engineering at Oakland University in Michigan. Her work focuses on the complex relationship between social behavior and neuroscience. Her books include Cold-Blooded Kindness (Prometheus Books, 2011) and Evil Genes (Prometheus Books, 2007).

Ariel Knafo is a senior lecturer in psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research deals with the genetic and environmental contributions to empathy and altruism and how children's genetics affect their behavior and the way parents react to them.

Guruprasad Madhavan, a bioengineer, is a program officer in policy and global affairs at the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council - collectively called the National Academies - in Washington, DC. He is senior co-editor of Career Development in Bioengineering and Biotechnology (Springer, 2008).

David Sloan Wilson is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University. His books include The Neighborhood Project (Little, Brown, 2011), Evolution for Everyone (Delacorte, 2007), Darwin's Cathedral (Chicago, 2002), and Unto Others (Harvard,1998).

Product Details

• Hardcover: 496 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1 edition (December 19, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0199738572
• ISBN-13: 978-0199738571
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 1.1 x 10 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #235,405 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Brings together several fresh fields of science in a remarkable series of papers September 27, 2012

By Graham H. Seibert TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This collection of papers explores many different manifestations of pathological altruism. One of the most extreme would be suicide bombers. A couple of the papers explore the cultural dimension of suicide bombers. What they do is reprehensible in according to Western cultural values, but may make sense, and indeed be altruistic, by the whites of the cultures in which the suicide bombers act. Likewise beheadings, to name one that they cite. We in the West look at beheadings is incredibly barbarous acts, but in another culture that is simply a means of dealing with crime. Other pathological altruists may be super patriots, military men who give their lives for other people and their units, battered wives who enable their husbands, likewise the wives of alcoholics who enable their husbands, people with eating disorders, cat ladies who supposedly taking care of animals actually affirm the men themselves, foreign aid donors, who are motivated more by the good feeling that comes with giving then the actual benefits of long-term benefits received by the beneficiaries. In this case they cite Linda Polman's book, The Crisis Caravan (which I reviewed) among others.

Science builds on theories. A theory starts out as a wild hunch. That hunch will be consistent with certain observations. The scientist posits it as a theory and devises future tests. The test can prove that a theory is true, but they can't prove that they are false. The theory which stands up to efforts to prove its falsehood for long enough becomes generally accepted. Theories thus move from the fringe, believed by a few, to being mainstream over a period of several years. A recent example would be the Big Bang theory of the creation of the universe.

So the progression is that something goes from a wild-eyed theory to a generally accepted theory and then from generally accepted theory to being a fact that is so universally accepted that it's everyday knowledge. Something such as Galileo's wild eyed theory that the earth revolves around the sun is now in the category of facts which everybody accepts.

There's a parallel process of theories operating in the political realm. People come up with political theories. Plato and Aristotle did. Karl Marx did. The Enlightenment did. Those theories may be subject to empirical tests but they are also subject to political operation. A theory may be false, but if it has the support of a majority of people in a democracy, is accepted nonetheless. Communism was based on a theory of human nature that was absolutely false. Communism posited that people were sufficiently altruistic that they would all work for the common good. This has nowhere been observed to be true and it proved not to be true in the Soviet Union. However the theory was imposed by popular the will, if not in Russia, at least in other places where the communists were voted into power. It has been tried.

Likewise, there have been a number of theories of human nature that have been popular through the 20th century. The most common of these might be called the Standard Social Science Model, which arose from the work of Watson and Skinner in the 1930s, which posited that human beings were all essentially the same, and that whatever differences occurred among adult individuals was a matter of their socialization. Watson famously said, give him 12 healthy infants and he will give you a doctor and a beggarman out of them. Who they became was 100% cultural, zero percent attributable to inherited traits.

The Standard Social Science Model has dominated the educational realm for 50 years or so. This Standard Social Science Model is the underlying hypothesis behind the theories that there are no differences among races, sexes, and people of different sexual orientations. That's the equality posited by democracy, rather, the equality under law but the labor which the Enlightenment philosophers said must exist, was also was true because people are in fact equal in capabilities.

Several new fields of science have emerged over the past third of a century, among them molecular biology and genetics, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and a rich literature on self deception. They are supported by a rich assortment of mathematical modeling tools and statistical analysis tools. These authors assume the reader to be familiar with the science and the supporting tools. They do not even acknowledge that huge swaths of the academic community have yet to abandon the Standard Social Science Model in the face of such rich bodies of new work. This book simply assumes a number of theories to be true. In other words, there is a sufficient acceptance of the theses upon which the theories in this book are based the nobody questions them. Let me list the interesting theories.

First, there is a thesis that human beings continue to evolve. It is pretty much universally agreed that the human species, Homo sapiens, migrated out of Africa 50,000 years ago. Evolution then continued among the peoples who immigrated out of Africa. Moreover, the pace of evolution quickened with the human diaspora throughout the planet, and especially since the dawn of agriculture.

Part of the cultural genetic evolution had to do with Asiatics and Europeans differential metabolic and mental processes governed by serotonin and vasopressin. The Oriental societies are more consensus oriented, more cooperative, whereas Western societies are more individualistic. This is demonstrated by genetic differences that parallel the cultural differences.

Similarly, these authors assume the theory that there are differences between men and women's brains. Men's brains are formed in the presence of testosterone in utero, and they operate somewhat differently than women's brains. The processes are the same, but under the influence of varying amounts of hormones, the outcomes may be different. Specifically, they find that men have a somewhat of a tendency to suppress emotion and look for engineering type solutions. The extreme example of this type of mindset has found an autistic people, who are predominantly male. At the other end of the spectrum there are people who are more driven by empathy. These are more frequently women than men, although there is broad overlap. The important question here is that there is neurological research to support empirical observations about sex differences.

One of the facts which underlies much of the science is the new tools and statistics that have emerged over the past few decades. One of them is structural equation modeling. The papers presented in this volume did not talk about that the mechanics, the tools by which they the researchers cited in their studies prove their points, but it is almost universally done using statistical methods, probably using the software found in the SPSS package - statistical package for the social sciences. The availability of the software, about 40 years now, has revolutionized the social sciences in that it is now feasible to do reasonably top reasonably good quality analyses. The papers cited here talk about the various study instruments and the correlations that they find. Establishing the validity of test instruments, questionnaires and the like, is an entire science of itself which is emerged in parallel. It is very true that not all tests in the social sciences conform to the rigorous standards of statistics and sampling techniques. Nonetheless, there are standards by which they can be measured, and when a test is cited in a papers such as the many in this volume, one assumes one at least knows that there are criteria to which the statistical analyses could be subjected if one wanted to criticize the question is not whether or not a given study is correct. There is a preponderance of evidence question. There are so many studies, pointing more or less the same direction, that unless there is widespread collusion that direction must be valid.

Another thing that is taken as given in all of the studies cited here is neurological research using fMRI that is, functional MRIs. Neuroscience has come an incredibly long ways. Neuroscientists are able to watch physiologically what happens in certain areas of the brain under all sorts of varying circumstances. We know now, the way that we certainly did not 30 years ago, which parts of the brain are involved in which functions. We also know a great deal more about genetics and we did 30 years ago. In the intervening time we have decoded the entire human genome, and we know which genes are generally involved in processes such as empathy, rest considered decision-making versus impulsive decision-making, wifebeating and many other social phenomena. While it is rare to find a genetic determinism, a situation in which a genetic anomaly definitely dictates some mental outcome, it is extremely common to find correlations that are significant between behaviors and genetic compositions of people. This is at odds with the hypothesis of the Standard Social Science Model, which only makes sense - that model is extremely dated, about 80 years old.

There is a question of free will which the author which many of the papers in this volume tackled. Given that there may be a genetic predisposition to some behavior, pathological altruism being the subject at hand, the question is to what extent do the actors retain free will, and to what extent are they simply the captives of their genetic makeup, and do not have any choice in how they behave. For instance, psychopaths have a typically different serotonin metabolism than normal people. Are psychopaths responsible for their actions? Here again we bring science up against social considerations. The social considerations are the laws, on one hand, and the political process which writes the laws. Read more ›

13 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb book! April 17, 2012

By Pigtails

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Pathological Altruism should be a subject taught in medical school as well as any professional school that deals with the psyche. It's certainly a controversial topic but it also one that needs more attention. Barbara Oakley's book seems well researched and provocative. It sheds light on a well known subject that few of us ever discuss or label as such. Who could think that true altruism would be anything but genuine? As Barbara Oakley's book suggest, altruism can often be the back door to hell!

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Not for the faint of heart February 9, 2013

By Monica Hess

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I'm still working my way through this book. I've learned a lot about myself, and it's helped me "cure" a few problems. But, as a non-professional, it's depth is intimidating!
This book should have its own psychology class attached to it. But, I am really and truly grateful for it and the lessons it has taught me. I'm sure I'll keep learning, too.