Source: BBC

By David Robson

Ludovico Boumbas was meant to be enjoying a friend’s quiet birthday meal when the shooting began at the Belle Equipe in Paris on Friday. He could have just dived for cover in terror, but when he saw a gunman take fire at a woman nearby, some other instinct took over. Friends say that he dived in front of the oncoming bullet, saving her life while ending his own.

The day before, almost 2,000 miles to the east, Adel Termos in Beirut had shown similarly selfless bravery. Seeing a man in an explosive vest approaching a crowd of people, he tackled him to the ground, detonating the bomb, a move that undoubtedly saved lives.

Two ordinary men, who showed extraordinary courage when atrocity struck. As the world comes to terms with the events of the last few days, we may hear many other tales of everyday heroism.

Why do some people show such amazing bravery? For those who give their lives, we can never know what was going through their minds, but David Rand at Yale University has examined many similar cases of everyday heroism to try to understand the thinking behind these kinds of selfless acts – and his findings should offer a chink of light in these dark times.

While remembering the victims, we can also learn from their courage (Credit: Getty Images)

When forced to make rapid, intuitive decisions, we tend to act the most selflessly

Rand’s previous studies had examined a more fundamental question: are we naturally predisposed to being selfish, or selfless? One idea was that our automatic response to any event would be to get what we can for ourselves, and we will only perform good deeds when we have calculated that there will be a greater reward later on. Being good, those psychologists said, takes a conscious, deliberate effort to suppress our worst impulses.

Yet in his experiments in the lab, Rand found the opposite: the less time people had to deliberate in his tests, the most selflessly they acted. He asked participants to play simple games for money, for instance. He found that they were more likely to share their cash with other players if they were rushed, so that they had to act intuitively rather than analytically. Equally, asking people to memorise a number – suppressing their conscious thought – while they played the games also made them more generous. There was some variation between people, of course, but on average, it seemed that they werenaturally predisposed to being cooperative and kind. They didn’t have to think about it; they just intuitively acted fairly. “Our default is to cooperate,” Rand says.

That’s not to say that the behaviour doesn’t have its benefits in the long-term; people who are cooperative may be more likely to reap a reward in the future, so perhaps we’ve all just learnt that it pays to be nice. But the idea that humans are naturally, intuitively generous is still somewhat more optimistic than the idea that our selfish desires are only suppressed by a calculating, rational mind.

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