Radiolab - How to Be a Hero

Episode Date: January 9, 2018

What are people thinking when they risk their lives for someone else? Are they making complicated calculations of risk or diving in without a second thought? Is heroism an act of sympathy or empathy?   A few years ago, we spoke with Walter F. Rutkowski about how the Carnegie Hero Fund selects its heroes, an honor the fund bestows upon ordinary people who have done extraordinary acts. When some of these heroes were asked what they were thinking when they leapt into action, they replied: they didn’t think about it, they just went in. Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky says there is a certain kind of empathy that leads to action. But feeling the pain of another person deeply is not necessarily what makes a hero.   Our original episode was reported and produced by Lynn Levy and Tim Howard. This update was produced by Amanda Aronczyk. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From. W. N. Y. C.

See? Yeah. Hey, this is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Aboumrod. I'm Robert Krollwich. Our topic today is. Goodness. Selflessness.

So we've done the math. Okay, so you ready for this? I am ready. All right. So a while back, we did this story that, for us at least, really, stuck in our heads. It was a story that was asking this really deep question and the answer that we got to. The answer didn't quite click. Right. I remember it that way. Yeah. So just to sort of set the table, the question was, why do people do good in the world? So we asked that question,

looked at it from the perspective of genetics, computer science, all kinds of things. We ended up profiling these three extraordinarily heroically good people. Yeah, they were heroes. They did remarkable things, each one. And we told their stories. We were. We were. We were with that question in mind. Why do certain people do good in the world and others don't? Yeah. And so we're going to revisit that question today

and the story that we told because I think we have something better and smarter to say about it finally. Something very peculiar to say about it, as it turns out. Yeah, so we're going to play you the original first and then we're going to come back and hopefully shed some new light on it. Yeah.

So here we go. Again, this story just began with a simple question. That question led us. Walter Rukowski. To a guy named Walter Ritzke. Ritkowski. And I'm the executive director and secretary of the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission. Cool. Well, thanks for doing this. Okay.

Can you just give us a little background on the Hero Fund? What is the Carnegie Hero Fund? The Carnegie Hero Fund is a private operating foundation that was established by Andrew Carnegie in 1904. And what we do is recognize civilian heroism throughout the United States and Canada by giving an award called the Carnegie Medal and accompanying the Carnegie Medal is a financial grant. How much? Currently, the amount is $5,000. Wow. And how do you guys choose your heroes?

We judge the heroic acts against a list of requirements. So then you have to have some kind of definition of hero, which includes some and excludes others. Yes. Perfect. A basic definition, which is a civilian, meaning no military, who voluntarily leaves a point of safety to risk his own life or her own life. Four. To an extraordinary degree. To save or to attempt to save the life of another human.

Six. And how about seven? Why? Can you read that one more time? Okay, I wasn't reading. That just came from memory. Oh, okay. Like, what is it that happens in a person's mind at that pivotal moment when they decide to voluntarily leave a point of safety and risk their life to an extraordinary degree to save the life of another human?

That's what we wanted to know. Should we just jump in? Okay. So the first one we have on our list is Laura Shrek. Okay. That's file number 73546, and the award number is 8,005. I am Laura Shrake. I'm from Mattoon, Illinois, and I currently live in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Oh, wow. Laura spoke with our producer, Tim Howard. Okay, so we're going back a little bit here. Yeah, 15 years. Back in the mid-90s. 1995. He was a 21-year-old college student. And I was driving through the country, and I saw a woman getting mauled by a bull in a pasture.

So she stopped to see what was going on. Jumped out and started yelling at her to see what I could do. The woman was on the ground and the bull was... 950-pound Jersey bull. Tossing her in the air and back on the ground. Wow. She was clearly struggling. And where were you?

I was right on the other side of the fence, but the fence was electric. So here's the moment that we find fascinating. At this point, Laura can either go, forward through thousands of volts of electricity toward an angry bowl that will likely maul her too, or she can stay safe. I went ahead and just climbed through the fence. And I don't remember ever feeling the electricity.

She says by the time she got through. Crazily enough. A neighbor had shown up and threw her a piece of pipe. Maybe about two feet long. So she approached the woman. Who was still conscious. The whole time she's yelling at me, hit the bull in the face as hard as you can and don't stop.

So Miss Shrek went up to the bull and beat it repeatedly with this two-foot length of tubing. I think it distracted the bull enough where she was able to get out from under him. And as soon as we were outside the fence, looking back into the pasture, the bull was literally right there at the fence. Kick the ground a few times and snorted. He was not happy. to our question. When you were there at that fence and you had the choice to either stay put or to go through it,

what was going through your mind? Was there a calculation there? No, I can't really say that, I mean. You didn't weigh your options or anything like that? I did not, no. It was just, here's the problem, here's what I need to do, and something needed to happen. Huh. So there's no choice moment?

Not that I recall. No. If nobody came to this woman's rescue, she would die. Unfortunately, this is the usual explanation, says Walter. No explanation. I couldn't stand there and not do anything. I was compelled to act. I didn't really take the time to think about what else could happen.

I can't say I ever really thought about my own life at that time. Okay, we just jumped ahead because we thought we'd try again. That's the voice of the next Carnegie Hero that Walter did. told us about. Yeah, William David Pennell. Name's William Pennell. Who is the 8,362nd person to receive the Carnegie Medal. Our producer Lynn Levy tracked him down.

Bill, can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. William David Pennell was 37 years old at the time of his heroic act. Was it 1999? Yes. It was early in the morning. It was like 3.19 a.m. in a small town near Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Menongahela, Pennsylvania. We was in bed sleeping in... My wife heard a lot of crash. I actually didn't hear it. And my one dog was carrying on, so right away, I run down there. Mr. Pennell went outside his house. There was a very bad automobile accident. A car crashed head on into a utility pole.

Flames was like rippling up the windshield out from under the hood. And he responded to the scene, wearing only sweatpants. No shoes or shirt or not on it. Bare chest isn't bare foot. So here we are. Bill's standing in front of this ball of fire. There are three teenagers inside that car, though he doesn't know it. He can either, A, do nothing, or B, go in.

Through the driver's door. And this big fella slumped out the door, so I reached in and grabbed the hold of them. Around the chest, pull him from the driver's seat out to the ground. In the meantime, the car was just, like, blazing. And my neighbor was there. She was hollering, there's more of them in there. So I run back to the vehicle. We found that the front seat passenger was trapped in the record.

I finally got him loose and pulled him out. Apparently, Mr. Pennell was aware that a third person was in the car, a third young man. Mr. Pennell entered the car a third time. By then, there was tires blowing at. The flames had grown to about three feet above the car's roof. The interior, like the headliner of the car and stuff, was dripping like plastic down on my back. I mean, I'm in there screaming. You know, somebody gave me a hand in here, but nobody would help.

And I reached in and grabbed the hold of the kid that was in the back. by the scruff of the neck and pulled him out. All right. So when you were coming out of your house and you looking at that car, what was going through your head? Well, just trying to help. I mean, I did what any normal person would do. I mean, you know, I just kept saying this is somebody's kids, you know what I mean?

At the time, my daughter was like 16. And I'm saying to myself, you know, if something, God forbid, whatever happened to her, that I would hope someone would be there to help. Did you ever talk to your neighbors and ask them why they didn't come in there? You know what? It's funny you brought that up because no, I've never brought it up. Never brought it up. How come?

I don't know. I guess maybe I probably wouldn't like their answer. I don't know. I don't know why I've never asked them out. What do you think is the difference between you and those other people who just sort of stood by? I couldn't answer that. I'm going to answer that. So our bull girl, she didn't know.

This guy didn't really know either. Somebody must be able to tell us something about what they were thinking at that moment that allowed them, that gave them the courage to do what they did. I can't give you a definite answer as to what propels people to do this, no. But we took one more shot with Walter, and after we take a quick break,

we're going to hear one more hero story from him. That's when we come back. This is Sam calling from Denver, Colorado. is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Chad. Robert. Radio Lab. We're back now with Walter Rakowski, who's going to tell us the third and final of his hero stories. And he told us that of all the cases he's heard, this is the one that puzzles him the most. It's the case of Wesley James Autry, a construction worker from

a New York, 50-year-old man, who did jump into the track bed in a subway station to remove a fellow, a young man who had fallen onto the track. The gentleman was 6'880 pounds. He was inert, and yet Mr. Autry persisted despite the fact that a train was coming. There would come a point, at least in my estimation, where you would have to say, I have to get out of here, because I'm going to be killed. I'm not suicidal. But Mr. Autry didn't think that way. He and I part in this manner. What he did was he lay atop the victim

between the rails while the train passed over them. In the farthest reaches of my imagination, I can see myself jumping onto a subway track to attempt the rescue. What I can't see myself doing is lying atop the victim while the train passes over me. Making this story even more nuts? When we finally met up with Wesley Autry on the platform

where this incident happened, under 35th in Broadway, he explained to us that his daughters had been with him. How old were your daughters? At that time, my daughter was four and six, and just them there. Showed us picture. Oh, my God.

Super cute. The one behind me is Shuki, and this is the baby Sashi. So when they're standing there, and this guy starts convulsing, and then eventually falls off the platform onto the tracks right as a train is coming. His choice is pretty stark. In order to save this complete stranger,

he's got to leave his daughters behind, potentially without a dad. I'm looking at him shaking and going into another seizure for some strange reason of a boy's out of nowhere sick. Don't worry about your own to worry about your daughters. You can do this. So he jumps, runs to the guy.

Is he conscious? No, no. He tries to grab the guy's hand. And each time I grab his hand, we'll slip apart. And when he slip, I look up the train that's getting closer. I grab his hand again, we'll slip apart. The train is closer. 50 feet, 10 feet, and then it's right there.

And all he can do is grab the guy, get him in a barrel hug, and flatten his body against the guy as much as he can. The first train car just grazed my cats. Train car went right over them. And when the train came to a stop, four to five cars, passed over us. I looked him in the eyes, I said, excuse me, you seem to have a seizure or something that I don't know you, you don't know me.

So I just kept talking to him until he came through. And he was like, well, where are we? I'm like, we're only trained. He said, well, who are you? I said, I came down and saved your life. So he kept asking me, are we dead, or we're in heaven? I gave him a slight pinch on his arm. He said, oh, I said, see, you're

very much alive. Have you? Did you ever ask yourself at this way, like, what am I doing here? I mean, he asked it, what am I doing here? Well, I can hear the two ladies. We had my daughter standing in between their legs. I can hear my daughter screaming. So when that train come to a stop, I yelled up from underneath the train.

Excuse me, I'm the father. We're okay. I just want to let my daughters know that I'm okay because I know that they are worried about me. Everybody started clapping. Can I ask you a question? So the point at which you said you heard a voice that said, I can do this.

I can do this. What is amazing to me is it you left your daughters right here and died after a guy you don't know. He was a stranger, total stranger, but you know what? The mission wasn't come completed. I was chose for that. You felt chosen. I felt like you were chosen. I felt like I was the chosen.

But for a religious person, though, I would wonder, why me? Well, you know what? maybe 20 years ago, I was supposed to be at a certain point. And then he explained to us exactly why he had jumped. He was the one guy who could. He said right before his feet left the platform, this one specific moment from his life flashed to mind. This thing that happened, you know, I had a gun pulled to my temple,

but, you know, it was a misfire, so, you know. A gun was put to your head and missed... So you were almost dead for a second or two. knows that, you know, so you think you might have been spared for a purpose? I was spared for a reason. After that moment, he says when the gun went click and he didn't die, he always wondered, why had God spared him that moment? Until he was on the platform and he saw the guy fall off.

He says then he knew, this is why. I can do this. He was just, I can do this. I can do this. That voice, when that boy said that you're going to be okay, I knew everything was going to work out. You know what I think at the end of the end? of the day. What's that?

I don't think that there's an answer to the question we ask. A hero question? Why were you a hero? I don't think that any three of these heroes. I mean, the last one had the longest explanation. He had been selected for some purpose, but does he know why he was telling him? Not a clue. See, guy number three gives me something. What does he give you? Okay, so the first two, right? They have no idea. None. So there's just something in them that made them act. But guy number three is talking about circumstances. The world prepared him for that moment. Serendipity. So it makes me think,

well, what if circumstances are just right? Maybe any of us could do that. I get a male man. He used to say to me all the time, he says, how did you manage to do that up there? How did you manage to pull them kids out? I don't know if I could have done that. I said, well, you know what? Don't say you wouldn't do this or you wouldn't do that, until you're put in that situation. In fact, when we asked Walter, how many nominations do you get a year? Are they hard to find? No, they are not hard at all to find. We are fortunate to be living in a society, regardless of what you hear elsewhere, we are fortunate to be living in a society where people do look out for others, even strangers.

He told us they've even had to up their guidelines to make it harder to win. Simply because of the vast number of heroic deeds that happen in day-to-day life. I got to say that we went with the story. feel-good thought about all the people who are doing good. I honestly don't think we knew what to say

to end that story. Well, it's nice to know there were a lot more good people than we thought. But we were trying to figure out why people who do that

do that and why we're different and they're different than us. And we didn't really get there. But then, this guy walked in. You should say, just for these purposes,

who you are, once again. Robert Sapulski. I'm a professor of neuroscience at Stanford. University. Robert has been on our program many, many times talking about any number of things, and he has just come out with a book called Behave, trying to explain why we do everything we do.

It goes into the brain, into history, into culture, everything. And we figured, well, maybe he would have something to say about our little puzzle. Yep. All right, well, let's just ask you, you've heard all three of these things. What does this, what do these three tales make you think? I think what we see with all three is how highfalut and moral reasoning plays like zero rule in what went on there. Moral reasoning doesn't do anything. And you know, the first thing that Robert Spolsky told us, which maybe wasn't that surprising, is that when we were asking people what were they thinking, that was sort of the wrong question. And everybody, as you saw, always gives the same answer, which is, I wasn't thinking. I was feeling about what if this were my 16-year-old daughter. or are hearing a voice or with the bull woman saying,

I wasn't thinking. Like, before I knew it, I had jumped in. The evidence suggests, Sibolsky says, that in situations like this, people just don't reason their way to a decision. That's not how it works. Correct. People don't think their way to a moral decision.

And in fact, if you give people enough time to really think their way in a circumstance like that, most people think their way to concluding, this isn't my problem, or somebody else will take care of it, or here's why it's their fault. So then we ask them, okay, if it's not thinking or moral reasoning,

then maybe what these heroes are doing is they're feeling, they're empathizing more than the rest of us, and that's why they do what they do. Ironically, probably not. Probably not? Yeah. Okay, so empathy, you're feeling somebody else's pain.

Pain, whether it's pain, your toes on fire or pain, you're feeling the pain of somebody else. Pain is painful. And if it's painful enough and acute and burning enough, what that translates into is, I can't take it. This is too upsetting and you need to run away. At some point, if you're mostly focused on, my God, what would this feel like if this were happening to me? That's the predictor of people who don't necessarily, don't very readily make that leap from feeling empathy to actually acting compassionately. No, that's not what I expected you to say. I thought you were going to take it the other way. So you're saying when it's hot, when it's me, me, me, me, me, my, your pain is my pain.

Those people are less likely to step forward? Yeah. They're less likely to actually go and do the compassionate thing. Spolski told us that there have actually been studies that have found this, that when someone actually empathizes, physically feels another person's pain, they're more likely to turn away from it rather than step forward and turn it. try and alleviate that person's suffering. You put somebody in a circumstance and, for example, how many shocks are they willing to get to

intervene to help somebody in some simulation game, for example? And you look at, is this the person whose heart rate soars when they see somebody else in this tough situation? Or is this the kind where it remains fairly steady? The latter is more likely to act compassionately. That's so interesting. Okay, so what we're barreling towards here is it's not so much about moral reasoning. It's not so much about vast empathy, but it's about a type of empathy that allows you to remain detached enough to actually act.

So emotional distance will create the humane or charitable act. Exactly. You need a certain amount of detachment. That's surprisingly where it comes in. And that runs counter to so many of our internal. instincts about what empathy should be about. And what I think we see here is probably the most reliable realm of people going and doing the heroic thing, which is when it's implicit, when it's automatic, when it's not you sitting there reasoning through, well, how many copies of my genes,

am I going to pass on if I do this or am I my close relatives, and where it's not empathy, oh, am I feeling for this person or as this person or with this person or above this? And instead, before I knew it, I had jumped in the river to save this child. And I think that's where you see some of the most interesting, reliably sort of heroic stuff when it's implicit, when it's automatic. And do you know how a person can get that kind of compassion made implicit? Is it something you're born with or something cultural at your parents putting you? Or do you have any idea? The thing is, we don't know a ton about the neurobiology of how a moral good goes from being a frontal task to an implicit task, but we know a ton about how that works in a much more mundane area, which is like you'll learn how to do something.

Like you're a pianist and you're learning some new tough piece of music. And there's this really tough trill. And every time you're playing it, as you approach the trill, you're thinking, here it comes. remember tuck your elbow in and lead with your thumb and do this. It is what would be called a declarative task, declarative explicit knowledge. And that's completely about this part of the brain, the hippocampus talking to the frontal cortex,

and it's sitting there saying, here it comes, and remember how you do it, and remember how you do it wrong, what happened last time, and how great it felt when you tucked your elbow in, so remember, do that. And then suddenly there's the day where you're playing the piece, and you realize your four measures past the trill and you played it just fine,

that's the first day you played it without having to think about it. And jargon in the learning field is it has stopped being an explicit declarative task and it's become an implicit procedural task. That's the first time your hands know it better than your head does. I mean, take somebody who's like beating the pants off of you at tennis and they've just done like some amazing backhand and crushed you. And what you need to do strategically now is force them to take that procedural knowledge and make a declarative again.

Stop at that point and give them this like obsequious smile. I say, oh my God, you're an amazing tennis player. That was an amazing shot. How did you do that? Do you put your hand over on this side of the racket or that side? And what about your butt? Are you scrunching your butt on the left side or the right? And you force them, it's like you make somebody like think,

very explicitly and procedurally how you go down flights of stairs and you're going to fall down the stairs because none of us have done stairs procedurally since we were about two and a half years old. So if a bunch of professors had swarmed over our threesome or at least the first two of our threesome, they might have been ruined for the next experience.

But if you let them do their natural thing, then they would rescue again, maybe, if they could just keep it implicit. Do you think that... If it's implicit? Do you think that it's a clean analogy? I mean, do you think that that the people for whom it is automatic,

it's automatic because they've practiced it in some way, in the way that, like, they practice. In some way, yeah, for example, lots of studies were done as to which people in either Germany or Nazi-occupied Europe, shielded Jews, gave them shelter, put their own lives at risk. And it wasn't predicted by a level of education.

There goes all that moral reasoning stuff. And it wasn't even predicted by things like religiosity. It was people who had simply been raised, you do the right thing. It was automatic. It was implicit for them. They didn't have to sit there and think about or feel about. It was automatic. Is that thank you, mommy and daddy?

Is that what that is? Thank you, mommy, daddy, rabbi priest. What is that? I think it's mostly that. But, of course, it's messier than playing a trill on a piano or doing a tennis backhand. I mean, people first learned about it, and you literally can see the transition from which part of the brain is handling the task. So the initial view was, okay, that's how you do trills on the piano. But then you see something even more amazing, which is more complex stuff happens.

My father, in his last years, had a pretty severe dementia. He was a professor. He was an architectural historian. And he reached a point where he could not identify the name. names of all of his kids consistently, didn't know where he was, what decade, etc. But prompt him and he could give you this totally

lucid, opinionated, cranky, entertaining 10-minute lecture on the history of flying buttresses and then come back two minutes later and prompt him again and he'd give you the exact same one again. For him, that was as implicit as

you know, the tennis player doing the backhand or playing the trills on the piano. And I fully expect when I'm demented someday, I'll give this exact lecture that I just gave and I can do it over and over and over until the students complain. So all sorts of stuff more complex than a tennis backhand becomes implicit. I think what we're seeing with the woman with the bowl there in the electric fence is some incredibly high-level abstract stuff becomes implicit as well. You don't like fling your elbow way out to the right when you do the trill. And you, you're

you don't stand by and watch somebody being like done in. You just before you know it, you don't reason, you don't feel, you just do it. Before I knew it, I had run in there. No, is this one of your lectures? Do you talk about this very thing not? In other words, when we come and visit you in 13 years, will you be greeting us with this very lecture? Precisely. Empathy.

Empathy is an interesting topic. Sit down. This will be on the final. Big, big thanks to Robert Sapolsky, whose new book is called Behave. This piece was produced by Amanda Aroncheck, and if you liked this story and it's kind of got you thinking, go and listen to our good show, which is at RadioLab.org.

There's a lot of stuff in the good show. Good stuff. There's a lot of good show. Good stuff in the good show. Yes. I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Provich. Thanks for listening. This is Graham Elwood from Memphis.

Radio Lab was created by Jad Abimrod and is produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Maria Matissar Padilla is our managing director. Our staff include Simon Adler, Becca Bresler, Rachel Cusick, David Gebel, Bethel-Hobty, Tracy Hunt, Matt Kielty, Robert Krollwich, Annie McEwan, Latif Nassar, Melissa O'Donnell, Arian Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Amanda Oronchic, Shima Olai, David Fox, Nigar Fatalai, Fahley, Phoebe Wang, and Katie Ferguson.

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