Super-heroes like Spider-Man have been by phenomenal and international successes. This attraction for the archetype of the hero, as explained by the psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875-1961), may have transmitted during the evolution due to the interest of altruistic behavior for the survival of the ‘species. Without mutual aid, difficult to build cities or fight against ferocious animals.
This preservation may also have been allowed by the association between altruism and the cerebral circuit of the reward. Thus, in 2010, Kathryn Buchanan and Anat Bardi, of the University of Kent (United Kingdom), were able to show how good doing good “. However, it is unfortunately a well -known fact, not all adults are altruistic. Do we know what is happening in the brain of a hero, that is to say that of a person who decides to help others despite the cost or the danger that this represents for himself?
In 2011, the Grit Heine team, from the University of Zurich (Switzerland), tried to measure how far a subject could feel the pain of others and how it could be linked to his will to Help this person. They used a measure of our emotions, the skin conductance (or electrodermal response). This measure is nothing other than the principle of the lies detector. When we are moved, we sweat and this modifies the way our skin drives an electric influx. The measurement of skin driving is therefore a revealer of our emotions (more than our lies).
virtual building on fire
In the first part of the experience, the researchers recorded this measure while participants received painful stimulation or while they observed other people suffering. In a second part, participants could choose to suffer themselves in order to avoid this suffering from other people.
The results are formal: the most altruistic subjects in the second part of the experience, who preferred to suffer in place of other people, are those who, in the first part of the experience, had the same answer electrodermal when they suffered themselves and when they watched others suffer. In other words, to really feel the suffering of others predisposed to altruistic behaviors even when they are expensive for oneself.
A few years later, in 2014, Marco Zanon, of the University of Trieste (Italy), and his colleagues set themselves the objective of Understand what was going on in the hero’s brains in a situation where a deadly danger was simulated. These authors placed the participants in A virtual fire building and, without informing them, the subjects found themselves in a situation in which they had to save their lives, selfishly, or stop and help a virtual person trapped in the flames, at the risk of putting themselves themselves in danger.
You have 23.74% of this article to read. The continuation is reserved for subscribers.