“And then, invariably I got the question of why would you do this for someone you don’t know. That’s the question that came up most often. ‘What if they are a bad person?’… I was always struck by that question more than anything.” - 23-year-old altruistic kidney donor, June, 2019.
Costly altruism for strangers has long represented a motivational puzzle. The overwhelming majority of altruistic acts, from sharing resources to everyday helping to donations of marrow and organs, are between people who are socially close (Burnstein, 2005; Organ Procurement and Transfer Network [OPTN], 2022). On a proximal level, such acts are often motivated by high positive regard (e.g., trust, liking, and related favorable beliefs) felt toward family and socially close others (Korchmaros & Kenny, 2006). Might high positive regard for people in general similarly support costly altruism for strangers? In this study, we assessed whether costly, non-normative altruism for anonymous strangers may correspond to higher positive regard for people in general—for example, favorable beliefs about other peoples’ traits, goals, and intentions.
Costly, non-normative altruism is epitomized by altruistic kidney donors, who number fewer than 4,000 adults in North America who have donated one of their kidneys to a stranger (OTPN, 2022). Perceiving strangers at baseline as deserving of help may be an important factor in these donations, in that beliefs about others’ goals, intentions and traits reliably influence actions in the social environment, with perceptions of others’ benevolence versus malevolence being particularly influential in various forms of prosociality (Yamagishi, Cook, & Watabe, 1998). For example, higher levels of generalized interpersonal trust and lower levels of cynicism are associated with more prosocial behavior (Turner & Valentine, 2001). But less is known about how explicit beliefs shape altruistic actions toward strangers about whom little or nothing about their goals, intentions, or traits is known. We posit that, just as perceptions about what specific known others are like shapes altruistic behavior toward those others, broad, abstracted perceptions about what people are like in general will be associated with real-world altruism toward those whose specific attributes are unknown.
We thus assessed whether altruism for strangers may be correlated with generally favorable perceptions of others’ benevolence or lack of malevolence using the Belief in Pure Good and Belief in Pure Evil scales. These scales were developed to measure perceptions about whether people can be purely good (i.e. altruistic and selfless) or purely evil (i.e. willing to intentionally inflict harm on innocent victims) (Webster & Saucier, 2013). Beliefs about others’ benevolent versus malevolent goals, intentions, and traits have been linked to self-reported and lab-based measures of prosociality and antisociality (Webster & Saucier, 2013), but never to objectively measured real-world altruism.
We also considered the potential role of religious and spiritual beliefs, as the conceptualization of the Belief in Pure Good and Believe in Pure Evil scales was influenced by religious and spiritual considerations, and belief in pure good is correlated with religiosity and Christian devoutness (Webster & Saucier, 2013). Little is yet known about the potential role of religious and spiritual beliefs in extraordinary altruism. One study found that 37% of those who have considered altruistic kidney donation cited spiritual beliefs as a motivation (Henderson et al., 2003). But in another investigation, only 17% of individuals who have actually donated cited religious reasons––despite more than half of participants having described themselves as religious (Massey et al., 2011). However, altruists’ specific religious and spiritual beliefs have not been systematically compared to those of demographically similar typical adults.
We therefore assessed belief in pure good, belief in pure evil, and the salience and centrality of religion and spirituality in a sample of altruistic kidney donors and demographically similar controls. We predicted that altruists would endorse greater belief in human benevolence and less belief in human malevolence. Given the observed relationship between self-reported empathy and belief in pure good (Webster & Saucier, 2013), we also accounted for empathy in our models. Data collection commenced in 2015 and thus predictions were not preregistered, which was not then common practice, particularly for large, longitudinal, multivariate datasets (Nosek et al., 2018).