What Makes a Hero?: The Surprising Science of Selflessness by Elizabeth Svoboda
This book has one of the best covers I’ve seen in years. So striking, people kept stopping by my desk and peering at it, trying to figure out what it was about. I don’t know how they made it, but the artist/designer deserves kudos.
This book is full of secondhand research about the science of altruism. I can sum it up: people can be cruel if they’re asked to be cruel. People who have suffered and were helped in the time of their suffering are more likely to be heroically altruistic. People who help other people on a regular basis are happier, healthier and live longer. With practice, people can become used to being those who regularly help others. It’s more of a book about how to help other people, when people help other people, why people help other people. Not in a sense that most of us would call “heroism” more like “altruism.” Both philanthropists and people who dash into burning buildings to save children help people, but I wouldn’t call writing a check “heroic.”
Much of this research I’d read about before, as Svoboda draws from such psychology staples as the famous Milgram prisoner experiment and the Good Samaritan late for a talk experiment. She’s read a lot of the same books I’ve read, it seems, and Svoboda uses the examples well to promote her ideas of how people can become more altruistic. She uses Anne Frank as an example, and the woman who housed Anne Frank, talked about how we are more likely to help one person than a group of people (even a group of two).
I do have a few problems with it. For one, I have not personally found that volunteering and helping others makes me happier. Usually, I feel extremely resentful and emotionally overdrawn when I help strangers, unless it’s something I enjoy enough that I’d do it anyway, like gardening. (The book Give and Take talks a little about this in more detail.) Two: I never found supplemental arguments for why a person would, on an individual level, want to be more altruistic. I don’t feel better about myself when I give money to a charity or to a homeless person, I just feel like I’ve been emotionally manipulated. Time spent in a soup kitchen would just be time away from my family. When I give a buck to some smelly guy on the subway, I don’t think “I’ve made the world a better place” so much as “I’ve probably enabled some deadbeat’s alcoholism.” Her altruism mostly focuses on helping strangers, and not so much on the daily helping others that one already does without thought when enmeshed in a solid social structure.
Svoboda spends the last section of the book discussing how people can become more altruistic, more focused on other people and less on themselves. The question she doesn’t answer is why I would want to be more altruistic. That may sound selfish and fatuous, but I think it’s a valid question. Perhaps she has a different kind of reader in mind, someone who feels they lack connection with other people, someone who feels good helping strangers, someone who doesn’t already feel like an anemic swimmer in a leech-filled guilt-pond of unpaid emotional work, who wants a treatise on how she can give even more of her limited resources about as much as she needs another hole in her head.
If you’re already interested in becoming more giving, more caring towards strangers, and more inclined to volunteer and donate to charity, this book will give you some ideas for how to improve. I imagine the target audience is someone who has plenty of money and free time, someone who feels a little lonely and needs more meaning in their life, someone who lacks connection with others, who feels like they are a good person, but wants to feel like a great person.
