Topic > The existence of altruism and its effects on society

IndexIntroductionProof of the existence of altruismAltruism in the Internet worldConcepts of online altruismCharacteristics of altruistic behaviors onlineManifestations of altruistic behaviors onlineIntroductionIt has long been hypothesized that the motivation of all intentional actions of human beings, including actions intended to benefit others, is selfish. People benefit others because they can ultimately benefit themselves. However, the empathy-altruism hypothesis challenges this assumption. The empathy-altruism hypothesis states that feelings of empathy for another person produce an altruistic motivation to increase that person's well-being. The term “empathy” refers to feelings of compassion, sympathy, tenderness, and the like; altruism refers to a motivational state in which the goal is to increase another person's well-being as an end in itself. (The definition of altruism in this hypothesis is different from the typical use of the term, which is usually defined as helping others at considerable personal cost to the helper himself.) The empathy-altruism hypothesis was used in Batson & Shaw ( 1991), the study that concluded the popular and parsimonious explanation of prosocial motivation in terms of universal selfishness must give way to a pluralistic explanation that includes both altruism and selfishness. The existence of altruism has long been proven with tons of studies, and the understanding of human society has changed since altruism was introduced to the world. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Human society is complex, there are so many different things that build the complete society we live in. Human relationships are one of the most important factors that people need to know to understand how society works. Relationships are what connect people to each other, create bonds between people. There are so many different relationships in the world and they can be both positive and negative. Altruism is one of the factors that influence relationships or determine the progress of relationships. But the question is: how badly does altruism affect relationships between people, in other words, to what extent does altruism affect human relationships? There are several aspects we can look at and examine the influence of altruism on society. Evidence for the existence of altruism Altruistic behaviors are now very common in human society, there are tons of evidence showing the existence of altruism and especially altruistic behaviors are discovered in economics. The economic system is the most common place from which people can benefit, according to the definition of both selfishness and altruism, both are linked to beneficial purposes, whether it is to benefit the subject himself or to pay with personal costs to benefit others, so instead of benefits you can easily find altruistic behavior. Molly Crockett, a psychologist, conducted an experiment with her team. In the experiment, Molly Crockett aimed to see whether people would care more about the benefit gained or the harm done to other people. There were 160 participants in the experiment and Molly and her team performed a small test on the pain threshold level of all participants, whose pain level will be used in the next experiment, for the electrical injection that would be used. After the test, the researchers separated the participants into groups, there were two participants in one group and one person would be selected to become the decision maker in the group for the experiment. So the group participants dothey would sit facing each other but would not be able to see each other and would know that their partners were facing them. After the participants were settled, the group decision maker was supposed to apply electric shocks to the partner, and electric shocks were labeled with prices ranging from $0.15 to $15. There were several choices for giving the electric shocks (one of the participants of the group will be randomly selected to receive the electric shocks, but whoever decides will always receive money), such as giving/receiving 7 shocks and receiving 10 dollars or giving/receiving 10 shocks and receiving 15 dollars, there was no conversation between the two partners of the group, whoever decided would make his own choice. Before the results were shown, Molly and her team predicted that participants would ignore the amount of electrical injections they were administering/receiving and would focus on the magnitude of the benefit. However, the results show that participants were more likely to choose the option that involved fewer electrical injections even when they received a smaller amount of money, which contradicts the prediction made by Molly. The conclusion of this study is that people are not willing to experience painful situations to benefit from them. And, more importantly, people are willing to get fewer benefits to protect others from getting hurt or in pain. In this study, actions aimed at obtaining fewer benefits to prevent harmful situations from happening to others are recognized as altruistic behaviors, participants gave up personal benefits to provide a safe and harmless situation to their partner even when they did not know each other. The Molly Crockett experiment provided evidence to support the existence of altruistic behavior in human society. Altruistic behaviors do not only exist among adults, in fact, even children are capable of exhibiting altruistic behaviors. In Harbaugh and Krause (2000), researchers conducted an experiment among children. In the study, children were randomly assigned to groups of six and given 5 white poker chips (tokens) as an endowment before each round. And the researchers set a low-MPR and a high-MPR treatment for the participants. Participants who were receiving a low-MPR treatment would have a marginal private return (MPR) of ⅓ of a token for each token contributed; participants who were receiving a high MPR treatment would have an MPR of ⅔ of a token for each token contributed. When the experiment began, there were two choices the children could make: keep the tokens in their own cups or contribute to the envelope. So the bundled contents in the bag would be doubled (quadrupled for the high MPR treatment). In this case, if each participant contributed, they would receive fewer tokens than they originally had, but as a group they would receive more. Furthermore, the researchers had highlighted the fact that if the participants do not contribute into the envelope. The results show that in most cases, participants were willing to contribute into the envelope to have a greater benefit for the whole group while they paid the costs and received nothing. In other words, these children gave up their personal expenses knowing that they would not gain any benefit from their contributions but still contributed to the benefit of other group members. Harbaugh and Krause (2000) showed that altruism is everywhere in human society, the age difference does not seem to be very significant for a person's level of altruism. Some psychologists argue that altruistic behavior is an innate ability of human beings; they believe that people are born into the world pre-programmed to be kind to others.others. However, Rodolfo Cortes Barragan, a psychology graduate student at Stanford, conducted an experiment with Carol Dewck, who is a psychology professor. 34 one and two year old children participated in the experiment, divided into two groups. In the first group, the experimenter rolled a ball back and forth with the child and chatted. After a few minutes, the experimenter pretended to accidentally drop an object from the table and observed whether the child would help him pick it up or not. In the second group, the experimenter and the child each played with their own ball (parallel play), while the experimenter engaged in the same type of chatter, then the experimenter “accidentally” knocked an object off the table after a couple of minutes. The result was that children in the first group were three times more likely to help pick up the objects than children in the second group. Barragan and Dweck concluded that innate altruism is an evolutionarily beneficial adaptation—in other words, instinctively caring for others would result in mutual caring, improving one's chances of survival. Furthermore, this experiment suggests that altruism and selfishness could coexist. Altruism in the Internet World With the rapid progress and promotion of the Internet, the Internet has significantly influenced brain science and the conduct of individuals. The study of the organization of brain research has become a hot topic in brain research, and numerous analysts have conducted many conversations on the organization of brain research and conduct, and have obtained more bizarre research results. In any case, taking a look at the exploration on the organization of brain science, one finds that the vast majority of studies focus on the negative impacts of the Internet, for example, Internet compulsion, Internet disruption, and l 'sexual entertainment on the Internet. In reality, the development of the Internet itself is not yet sufficiently developed, and a systematic system requirement and convincing system details have not yet been formulated. Likewise, individuals neglect to identify the best harmony between the social system and reality. There will be some problems during the time spent using the system and the system has brought a series of pessimistic impacts on people. In any case, too much focus on the negative effects of the Internet will limit the examination to a specific mode of reasoning and may not fairly reflect the Internet's work on research into people's brains. It may also cause illusions or misleading information, leading to negative opinions about Internet use. In fact, just like in the real world, even if some immoral and irregular behaviors exist in the online society, these behaviors are only a part of the network's behavior and cannot summarize the overall panorama of online life. In addition to negative phenomena such as deception and attacks on the Internet, there is also a warm side. On this hot side, the last thing to ask for is altruism from the network. Altruistic behavior is also widespread in daily life, but thanks to Internet sharing and openness, the benefits of this behavior have been greatly expanded. Wallace points out that altruistic behavior online is more than helping behavior in real life. There are many benevolences in online life at all times. There are all kinds of altruistic behaviors, ranging from actively adjusting the atmosphere of online forums to providing useful information to fighting cybercrime and saving the lives of others. On the Internet, people are increasingly willing to helpstrangers than in real life, in other words, people on the Internet show a high spirit of altruism. Concepts of Online Altruism In recent years, national researchers have debated the definition of altruistic network behavior. According to Weimin, altruistic behavior online refers to behaviors that meet social expectations and are beneficial to others, groups, or society in the online environment. It is not fundamentally different from real-life altruistic behavior. Wang Xiaolu and Feng Xiaotian state that altruistic network behavior refers to conscious voluntary behavior in the network environment that will benefit others and cause material losses without obvious selfish motivations. Among them, "material loss" refers to network fees, time, energy and virtual network currency spent by helpers to help others; "no obvious selfish motivation" refers primarily to those who do not expect to have spiritual or external material rewards, but does not exclude intrinsic rewards such as psychological satisfaction and self-fulfillment obtained by doing good things. Peng Qinghong and Fan Fuyi define altruistic behavior online as voluntary behavior that occurs in the network environment and will benefit others without the actor's selfish motivation. It can be seen that researchers' definitions of altruistic behavior online are similar. We can understand the meaning of online altruistic behavior from the following aspects: 1. Network altruistic behavior needs to be performed in the network environment with the help of online media. 2. The purpose of altruistic behavior online is to benefit others. 3. Altruistic behavior online is completely autonomous behavior and does not occur under the influence of external pressures. 4. Altruistic behavior online does not involve any form of reward or reward, but does not exclude the intrinsic rewards of psychological satisfaction, satisfaction, etc. after altruistic behavior. 5. Altruistic network actors can lose money and have to pay a certain price in time, energy and material. Characteristics of Altruistic Behaviors Online Researchers have described the characteristics of altruistic behavior online. Peng Qinghong and Fan Fuyi summarized the characteristics of network altruism as: 1. Immateriality, that is, network altruism is not material transmission, but information flow. 2. Extensiveness, i.e. the occurrence of altruism in the network has a wide range of participation, basically it is not limited by region, nationality, time, etc. 3. Timeliness, that is, the process of online altruistic behavior from sending help signals to feedback of altruistic behavior can be basically synchronized. 4. Openness, that is, in addition to netizens' identity information Outside of anonymity, the process of online altruism is publicly reflected on the Internet. Wang Xiaolu and Feng Xiaotian point out that the characteristics of adolescents' altruistic online behavior are: 1 ) Adolescents' altruistic behaviors on the Internet are timely and effective. 2) Teen netizens are heterogeneous. 3) Teens have intellectual advantages in altruistic behavior online. 4) The altruistic behavior of young people online has a continuous interaction. 5) The influence of factors that hinder the occurrence of altruistic behavior in the network is weakened. 6) Supporting the altruistic behavior of young people on the Internet has a realistic basis. An Xiaolu used the "programming community" of the Monopoly Forum and the China Software Network Expert Forum as examples to explore the new features of.