When faced with the chance to help someone in mortal danger, what is our first response? Do we leap into action, only later considering the risks to ourselves? Or must instinctive self-preservation be overcome by will-power in order to act? We investigate this question by examining the testimony of Carnegie Hero Medal Recipients (CHMRs), extreme altruists who risked their lives to save others. We collected published interviews with CHMRs where they described their decisions to help. We then had participants rate the intuitiveness versus deliberativeness of the decision-making process described in each CHMR statement. The statements were judged to be overwhelmingly dominated by intuition; to be significantly more intuitive than a set of control statements describing deliberative decision-making; and to not differ significantly from a set of intuitive control statements. This remained true when restricting to scenarios in which the CHMRs had sufficient time to reflect before acting if they had so chosen. Text-analysis software found similar results. These findings suggest that high-stakes extreme altruism may be largely motivated by automatic, intuitive processes.

Funding: Financial support for the John Templeton Foundation (through a subaward from the New Paths to Purpose Project at Chicago Booth) is gratefully acknowledged. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Introduction

Cooperation, defined as paying a cost to give a greater benefit to one or more others, is an integral part of human behavior and a cornerstone of human societies [1]–[12]. While cooperative behavior improves group welfare, the personal incentive to be selfish poses a challenge to cooperation. A large literature across numerous fields has sought to understand the origins of cooperative behavior, and numerous mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation have been identified [5], [8]. These include direct reciprocity [13]–[22], indirect reciprocity [23]–[32], population structure [22], [33]–[39], group selection [40]–[46], and kin selection [47], [48]. In addition to these ultimate explanations for cooperative behavior, it is also of both scientific and practical importance to understand the proximate psychological underpinnings of cooperation [49]–[54].

A growing literature explores cooperation, and prosocial behavior more generally, using a dual process framework, in which decisions are conceptualized as resulting from the competition between two cognitive systems: one that is fast, automatic, intuitive, and often emotional, and another that is slow, controlled, and deliberative [55]–[61]. We follow conventions in evolutionary biology and define prosocial behaviors as those which benefit others; altruistic behaviors as prosocial behaviors which are individually costly; and cooperative behaviors as altruistic behaviors where the cost paid is smaller than the benefit provided to others (i.e. cooperation is costly and non-zero sum).

A range of recent laboratory studies have examined the role of intuition and deliberation in cooperation and altruism using economic games. In these games, players make choices which affect the amount of money they and others earn. For example, a canonical game for studying cooperation is the Public Goods Game, where a group of participants simultaneously choose how much money to keep for themselves versus how much to contribute for the benefit of the other group members; and for altruism is the Dictator Game, in which one participant unilaterally chooses how to divide a sum of money with another person. Experiments have manipulated cognitive processing while participants played these games, increasing the role of intuition by applying time pressure [62]–[65] and conceptual priming of intuition [63] to the Public Goods Game, and cognitive load [66]–[68], immediate rather than delay timing of payments [69], [70], and disruption of the right lateral prefrontal cortex [71] to the Dictator Game, and finding increases in participants' willingness to pay money to benefit others (although some other studies find null effects for some of these manipulations [72]–[74]). Furthermore, participants seem to project a cooperative frame onto neutrally framed Prisoner's Dilemma games [75], and analyzing free-text narrative descriptions of participants' decision processes during Public Goods Games finds that inhibition is associated with reduced cooperation, while positive emotion is associated with increased cooperation [76], [77].

The “Social Heuristics Hypothesis” (SHH) has been proposed as a theoretical framework to explain these results and predict potential moderators [62]. The SHH adds an explicitly dual process perspective to work on cultural differences [6], [78]–[81], norm internalization [82]–[85] and exchange heuristics [86], [87] in order to understand how intuition and deliberation interact to produce selfish or generous behaviors. The SHH postulates that we internalize strategies that are typically advantageous in our daily social interactions as intuitive default responses. When confronted with more atypical social situations, our automatic response is to continue to apply these daily life defaults; but then more reflective, deliberative processes can override these automatic defaults and shift our behavior towards that which is most advantageous in the specific context at hand. In sum, strategies which are advantageous (i.e. payoff-maximizing) in daily life interactions become automatized as intuitions, and are then over-generalized to less typical settings. Direct evidence for such spillovers comes from experiments where exposure to long or short repeated games influences subsequent behavior in one-shot anonymous interactions [85].

These laboratory experiments using economic games provide valuable insight into the cognitive underpinnings of cooperation and altruism: they offer a high level of control and precision, and make quantification easy. Although these games are very simple and decontextualized, there is evidence that game play is reflective of underlying moral values, and predictive of actual helping behavior in a task which is not obviously part of an experiment [88]. The question remains, however, of how intuition and deliberation function outside the laboratory, particularly in contexts where helping others is more costly than it is in these low stakes games. One piece of recent evidence in this vein comes from a correlational study showing that individuals with little self-control are more likely to make sacrifices for the benefit of their romantic partners [89]. Classic work studying more contextualized helping behavior, such as agreeing to help another student study [90] or taking electric shocks on behalf of another participant [91] has suggested an important motivational role of empathy, implicating emotional (i.e. intuitive) processes. Finally, a recent study examined the extremely costly behavior of kidney donation (albeit not from a dual process perspective) and found that across the United States, kidney donation was more likely in areas with higher subjective well-being [92].

In the present paper, we explore the role of intuition and deliberation in the highest cost of all decisions: risking one's life to save a stranger. It is obviously infeasible and unethical to study actual behavior of this kind in the laboratory, and while surveys of hypothetical extreme altruism can be very informative (e.g. [93]), they are inherently limited, as most participants have no experience with such situations and there is reason to doubt the accuracy of self-reports in this domain.

Instead, we examine actual acts of extreme altruism using archival data: published interviews with people awarded medals by the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission for risking their lives to an extraordinary degree saving or attempting to save the lives of others. Although we refer to this behavior as extreme altruism, we note that in most cases this behavior actually meets the definition of cooperation given above: when you risk your life to save another person, the aggregate outcome is better than if you chose not to (as long as you have a good enough chance of saving the other person and not dying in the process).

Based on the evidence of intuitive cooperation from low-stakes economic games, and the role of emotion in more contextualized helping, we predicted that the interviews with these Carnegie Hero Medal Recipients (CHMRs) would reveal that their heroic acts were motivated largely by automatic, intuitive responses. In two studies, we confirm this prediction. In Study 1, we had participants read excerpts from the CHMRs' interviews in which that described their decision-making process, and rate them as relatively intuitive versus deliberative. In Study 2, we analyzed the level of inhibitory language in these excerpts using a computer algorithm.