The altruistic personality: Insights from research with extraordinary altruists

Humans possess a remarkable capacity for altruism, frequently providing help to a wide range of beneficiaries, including strangers. But people also vary in their tendency to behave altruistically. A small subset of people engages in extraordinary altruism: rare, costly, non-normative acts such as non-directed organ or marrow donation, heroic rescues, and humanitarian aid work. These extraordinary altruists may be a uniquely valuable population for identifying traits that underlie altruism. This is because extraordinary altruism typically occurs in contexts that offer few potential self-benefits and have weak or absent social norms, helping isolate dispositional from situational influences. Recent research with extraordinary altruists suggests individual variation in altruism reflects stable differences in how much people value others' welfare relative to their own welfare. Measures that most reliably distinguish extraordinary altruists from controls include the social discounting task and the honesty-humility scale of the HEXACO personality inventory, both of which capture differences in the subjective value of one's own versus other's outcomes. Extraordinary altruists are not distinguished by trait agreeableness or self-reported empathy. However, neuroimaging and behavioral studies find that extraordinary altruists display heightened empathic accuracy and heightened empathic neural responding to others' distress in brain regions implicated in prosocial decision-making. Improved understanding of the traits that distinguish highly altruistic people can offer new insights regarding how to cultivate altruism on a broader scale, for example, through interventions that foster stable increases in how much people value others' welfare.