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Empathy and Reasoning Aren’t Rivals
A research paper shows the common connection across different kinds of generous people
Studying altruism is hard to do because you need to find a population of people that are demonstrably more generous than the average person.
Two groups that make for interesting research subjects are people who make kidney donations to strangers and people who are part of the Effective Altruism (EA) movement. What's interesting about these two groups is that the kidney donors are driven by higher levels of empathy, and the EAs pursue rational approaches to impact. (A lot of EAs are also kidney donors, because of how impactful it can be.)
This paper shows that both groups share a common attribute, a recognition that distant others are important.
On average, organ donors scored higher on empathy, and effective altruists scored higher on reflective reasoning – slowing down and thinking things through. But across all participants, both traits were linked to broader, more outward-looking helping. People with either an elevated heart or head, and especially those with both compared with average adults, tended to support distant others and focus on helping as many people as possible.
