Altruism
The Basic Idea
In 2007, something unexpected happened in a New York subway station. A construction worker named Wesley Autrey witnessed a young man suffer a seizure, stumble, and fall onto the train tracks. Autrey saw the lights of the next train coming around the corner and without a second thought dove onto the tracks to protect the young man. As there was little time, Autrey threw himself over the man’s body, pressing the man down into one of the drainage cracks, acting as a human shield to protect him from the train. Luckily, both men survived. When Autrey was asked what compelled him to do such a selfless act, he replied, “I just saw someone who needed help. I did what I felt was right.” Autrey’s brave behavior is a classic example of altruism. Altruism the practice of making sacrifices for other people’s benefits due to our care for their well-being. The opposite of altruism is egoism: the sole concern for maximizing one’s own welfare, regardless of the needs of others.
If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.
– Albert Einstein
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
