The Infinite Monkey Cage - How selfish are we really? - Jo Brand, Matti Wilks and Steve Jones

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

Brian Cox and Robin Ince kindly open the door for each other as they step into understanding altruism asking why humans have evolved to help each. Joining them to explore the human tendency to be kind is evolutionary biologist Steve Jones, psychologist Matti Wilks and comedian Jo Brand. Starting with the animal kingdom we probe the biological underpinnings of why organisms might act to help others at an energetic cost to themselves and where this fits alongside the theory of evolution. We explore how the development of human societies has necessitated altruistic behaviours and how these manifest in our modern lives. Matti introduces the idea of moral circles as we ask why are we more generous to some people than others. We explore how children feel about being kind to those close and far away with some surprising recent findings and finally consider what can encourage more altruistic behaviour.Producer: Melanie Brown Exec Producer: Alexandra Feachem Assistant Producer: Olivia Jani

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Nicola Coughlin. This is history's youngest heroes. Rebellion, risk and the radical power of youth. She thought, right, I'll just do it. She thought about others rather than herself. Twelve stories of extraordinary young people from across history. There's a real sense of urgency in them.

That resistance has to be mounted, it has to be mounted now. Listen on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. You're about to listen to the Infinite Monkey Cage. Episodes will be released on Wednesdays wherever you get your podcasts from. But if you're in the UK, the full series is available right now, first on BBC Sounds. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Ince and this is the Infinite Monkey Cage. Now today we're discussing the science of altruism, a concept first explored in detail

by the French philosopher Augustus Comte. So scientifically not only was Comte actually a philosopher, he was also a cheese maker. And though that might not sound that it is linked, everyone here who has sat around a cheese board will know that towards the end of the evening, you can get harder and harder to take a smaller and smaller piece of cheese, never wanting to take the very, very final bit. And you will actually see through altruism that, for instance, if you're sat around at a family party, very often, if there's two children there and they're children of your own,

you will allow them to have half the gouda. Whereas if you then have, say, cousins around you, you will often find that you would only share a certain amount of, say, the boursin with the goat's cheese. But the important thing, and if there's... Conte, same. Conte, it's got an accent on the E. It's different. That's a region of France close to Switzerland. Comte doesn't have an accent on the E. It's got nothing to do with it at all. So he wasn't a cheese maker? I can't just ignore everything I said then. Though I would like to make it clear from an altruistic point of view that if ever there

is Wensleydale and cranberry cheese then just have it. It shows no generosity of spirit to give them that foul Wensleydale. Today we're looking at altruism. And cheese! What is altruism? Is there really such a thing or is it just a product of our selfish genes? Is helping others a uniquely human trait or do we see altruistic behavior in other animals? Do you know what? It's such a pity it's not cheese and philosophy.

You know that bit where when you throw a possible pun in the room and then all I could see was, ah, Kamen Bertrand Russell. And then followed immediately. Unfortunately, the philosophical cheese boom was destroyed in the postmodern years by Foucault. Anyway, so there we go. That's, sorry. I love that, the philosophical cheeseman. It's a great name for probably a Wurzels tribute band

that play the North Somerset area. Anyway, to help us understand kindness, we're joined by a social psychologist, a snail biologist, and a gingerbread gastronomist. And they are? Steve Jones. I'm professor of genetics at University College London. And I've been there for 50 years,

which was about the only high point in my career. And my favorite altruistic act was done by the University of Edinburgh, strangely, many years ago, because as a Welshman living in Liverpool, I wanted to go back to Wales, the obvious place where a Welshman would be happy. All the Welsh universities turned me down and I have to say since then they were all, all four of them, have given me honorary degrees. I always make a point of saying this in a

very marked manner when I wanted a real degree you didn't give it to me and I mouth the words you bastards. There's nothing altruistic about that anyway. Hi I'm Maddie Wilkes. I'm a lecturer in psychology at the University of Edinburgh. I study a whole range of things related to morality, how we morally value different beings, what our moral circles look like, things like that. I'm thinking about one of the nicest altruistic things that someone has done for me, I was once on holiday in Japan with my mom, and we were trying to find our Airbnb.

And for those who don't know, Japan has blocks rather than streets, so you don't have street names and numbers. We were very, very lost walking around trying to find where we had to go. And this random man on the street saw us and came over, and I don't speak any Japanese, and he didn't speak any English,

but he took time out of his day, not just to tell us where to go but to walk us the entire way to our apartment into the front door and it just really stuck with me that he didn't have to do that and he it really made our holiday a lot better and he also didn't come back later and murder us which is also very nice. Hello I'm Jo Brands. The most altruistic thing someone's ever done for me was millions of years ago me and my mate Andy went hitching around France, don't do that kids, and we were picked up by this lovely guy who's a doctor and he

drove us about 80 miles a long way and when we got out the car we realized we'd left our passports on the roadside where he'd picked us up, and he drove us all the way back. And it took a couple of hours, and then he took us out as well for a drink. And I feel really bad that I nicked his wallet. LAUGHTER And this is our panel. What is altruism? How do we define it?

So psychology actually has done a really bad job of defining things like altruism and morality. There's a lot of different definitions that float around. I think personally a helpful way to think about it is an act that's kind or compassionate towards somebody else for which you don't expect anything in return and it's usually something that's quite costly as well. So what would be, if you just give us a classic like kind of day-to-day moment, obviously earlier on you mentioned that one of the altruistic acts is not to kill people, but what would be a typical thing that perhaps quite a few people in this audience now today might have experienced in the last week? So I think if you see somebody on the street that's

asking for money or needs help going up and being able to help them or just something as simple as holding the door for somebody or you know helping them find their apartment when they're lost in a foreign city so small things like that are kind of more everyday kinds of altruism that we see. Steve how would you define altruism? As an evolutionary biologist, I say reducing your own fitness. In other words, reducing your ability to pass on your own genes to increase the ability of somebody else doing that. And that seems a slightly anti-evolution point of view to take because Darwin would never really have thought of that.

Evolution was all about increasing your own fitness, not helping somebody else. But there are conditions where it can happen. There are some famous cases where it has actually happened. On Scott's last expedition, typically British failure, badly prepared, short of money, came second in a race of two, and because Amundsen got to the South Pole first, they turned around and came back and they had horses with them and they refused to kill the horses because

they were horses, you don't kill horses, so that slowed them down and they starved to death because they didn't shoot the horses and eat them. Now I suppose I should ask, now the horses were just left with a load of dead human beings around, did the horses were just left with a load of dead human beings around them, did the horses live? One got back very strangely because all the explorers died only 11 miles away from where the rescue party was and the rescue party came to try and find them and found their bodies and they also found a sledge which they dragged all the way from the South Pole loaded with. And those rocks are actually now in the National History Museum. You can see them.

They're just rocks. But they were the first hint of continental drift and the breakup of continents. So Captain Scott actually discovered continental drift, so it was worth doing, worth dying for, I would say. I should ask you, Joe, for your definition, given that we're on. Before that, I want to know, would you eat a horse for your own survival that we're out before that I want to know would you eat a horse for your own survival and often have was I yeah I for my if it was for

survival yeah wouldn't have to cook it though what do you what do I think altruism is doing something nice for someone without expecting anything back except a very small amount of money. Steve, so if we go back let's say to the Neanderthals or I don't know Homo erectus or Australopithecus afarentis, when do we start to see evidence that there's, I suppose you could call it collaboration I suppose in a sense rather than just this pure biological drive. You see collaboration, I mean the oldest, some of the oldest Neanderthals known are in

Siberia and now that you can look at DNA it turns out that lots of those neanderthal gangs, and we're going back a long way now, they were family groups so there was kind of kin selection, they'd stay together as an extended family often with two or three generations and maybe 30 or 40 people in the gang. So that was collaboration of a sense and keeps them alive. That's collaboration with genetics and you can see how that works because it makes you fit. Why you should collaborate in other ways is less clear but I often think of getting on a number 29 bus which is filled with chimps, okay. I often get on the number 29 bus and it is filled with

chimps, at least metaphorically speaking, particularly after 11 at night. And of course, that wouldn't work at all because the chimps would fight, would fight to literally fight to the death. So what we've managed to do is to hide our chimp-like ancestry, largely by losing most of the genes and different genetic differences that chimps have. Homo sapiens, the species to which many of us claim to belong, is the most uniform mammal of all. We are more similar across the world than any other mammal and of course we are by far the most abundant

large mammal. And I think that's not a coincidence because gorillas and chimps fight each other if they come into conflict and they often kill each other. We don't do that until we invented atom bombs but we can still regard ourselves as remarkable, extremely abundant and yet remarkably less quarrelsome than any other mammal. We should say by the way, this is entirely true, that also Steve does live very, very near to London Zoo. So there is a high percentage chance that you've not been getting on the right bus Excuse me, this is a London Zoo transport system. I don't care Can I just say I don't think Robbie Williams has done very well hiding his chimp ancestry

Mattia so Steve described I suppose you you could see how altruism could begin in smaller groups and then you move to wider groups. So in terms of your studies of altruism today in our societies, can you begin to explore it in terms of group size? So it's clearly something that we would expect, I suppose, within a very close-knit community, a family and so on. And then how does it change as it spreads out to a larger group? This is a really fascinating question

and I don't think it's one that we've done a particularly good job of answering a lot of the work that we do on altruism and morality and moral judgments is sort of done in labs and in these sort of small scale environments and If you think about altruism, there's so there's this concept of reciprocal altruism So you're altruistic with the assumption that at some point in the future that person will reciprocate. And so this is sort of an explanation that could try to explain why altruism would have evolved in some cases. But a lot of the work that we do is in these kind of small-scale studies where we're looking at altruistic behavior among our close others and what our research shows is that we look at things like group biases, we're much more

likely to be altruistic to people who are similar to us or who are close to us in all of these different ways. So we do know that. There's a little bit of work coming out now on this group which are termed sort of extraordinary altruists, and these are people who are particularly altruistic to complete strangers, so to people that they'll never meet or never engage with. So as an example, we were talking earlier about people who make altruistic or non-directed kidney donations. So these are people who donate a kidney to a complete stranger.

They don't have any particular person in mind. And I think psychology has done a really bad job so far of explaining why we would do that. So why we would be altruistic in these kind of larger scale societies when altruism seems to be kind of underpinned by either familial closeness or this expectation of reciprocity. From an evolutionary perspective,

are we really saying that it would have begun as a cooperation in small groups, probably family groups, and you can see why that would be advantageous? Yes, I think, yeah. But of course, we have plenty of altruism, which is not related to that at all. I mean, there is stuff called reciprocal altruism. And chimps have reciprocal altruism, if one chimp is infected with with insects with lice

say it'll pick off the insects of another chimp which will return its complement so that you balance it out. It doesn't have to be reciprocal altruism we wouldn't have civilization be impossible without pure altruism. It just couldn't survive. And in some senses, the ability to speak is central to that fact because it's very easy to sense once somebody's attitude towards you or towards somebody else from what they say. It's much more difficult by looking at the expression on their face unless they're, you know're sweating with rage. So that's what speech does, it cuts down the tension.

That's why everybody in the audience is slowly nodding off, even as I speak. But that's interesting. Matthew, I was just wondering, because collaboration came up there. So what is that murky line between what we might describe as collaboration and altruism? Because that collaboration immediately is saying,

we're all working together, we're building this together. Whereas altruism seems to have, at the very least, a possible delay, or as you were saying, no reward whatsoever, or at least overt reward. I often get asked, you know, is there such thing as pure altruism or true altruism where there's no self-benefit? And I think it would exist, but it's likely very rare.

So even if you're doing something that, you know, this person hasn't asked you to do and you're not gonna get anything for it you're still feeling good and so I think it's it's not as clear to me what pure or true altruism really is and so then the line... Can I just ask is that so bad feeling good about doing something nice for someone? I don't think so, no. I think it's fantastic and it encourages people to do more good. Yeah, so but people sort of they use it as an excuse that there's no such thing as an altruistic act because if it makes you feel good it's not altruistic but I don't think that's the worst

sin in the world really is it? So I don't think people are, say you are donating a kidney, if you were doing that there's not right at the front of your brain going ha ha ha I've donated a kidney. If you were doing that, there's not right at the front of your brain going, ha ha ha, I've donated a kidney and then when I need some hearts and lungs they'll give that, you know, it's not even in the background is it? It's like however much we might, most people doing an altruistic act are, I think anyway, predominantly just trying to do something nice. Apart from the ones on Instagram and TikTok. Yeah, or those overcharging for frankly used kidneys. Yes, absolutely. Is this a line we should draw? Because I suppose it's obvious evolutionarily that you could get...

So cooperation helps in a group. But I suppose altruism, are we defining it precisely as something for which there is no obvious reward other than, as you you said something like happiness, which is a very high level Yeah problem with altruism is if you cheat you win okay, and there's all kinds of Impenetrable mathematical models about this you know if you make an altruistic act, and you do brain scans Molecular phrenology as we call it nowadays And you make it then the the part of your brain that lights up when you do a scan is next to the pleasure

center. Oh okay. You know just the feeling you have after you've just drunk a good bottle of wine. So you only get to do an altruistic act it's much cheaper. Matty, are humans born with, is altruism part of a child you know one year old or two year old or two year old, or does it develop? So very young babies it's very difficult to do research with, right, because they can't speak and so it's very hard to ask them, you know, is this the morally right thing to do? But there's some work actually from my old postdoc advisor Paul Bloom and his collaborators where they looked

at really young children, so six months, three months old, and how they think about prosocial and antisocial behavior of others. So they run these little experiments where you have one little triangle that is trying to go up a hill, and then you have somebody, one of the triangles comes along and tries to push the other triangle down, and then you have a circle

that comes along and tries to push the triangle up. So basically someone that's clearly hindering and somebody that's clearly helping. And then they sort of had these really young babies interact with or engage with the h hindera and the helper triangles. And what they find is that from around six months, maybe a little earlier, children prefer the helper to the hindera.

So they prefer, they want to give more rewards to the helper. They're more surprised if somebody approaches the hindera. They want to punish the hindera. So there's a very early emerging sense of awareness of prosociality and antisocial behavior, but it's certainly not as evolved They want to punish the hinderer. So there's a very early emerging sense of awareness of prosociality and antisocial behavior,

but it's certainly not as evolved as what we see in adults. And then as children grow up, they become actually very parochial in some sense. So young children are very group focused. So they prefer in groups to out groups and things like that. But in some of my own recent work, we find that this isn't as true in certain domains. So we find that compared to adults,

children actually seem to grant more moral concern or express more moral concern for animals, for strangers as compared to family members, and also to people who are really far away, so to distant others. So if you ask about how much obligation we have to help somebody who lives in the same country as you or how much obligation we have to help someone

who lives in another country, adults will say that we have less obligation to help somebody who lives in the same country as you or how much obligation we have to help someone who lives in another country. Adults will say that we have less obligation to help somebody who lives in another country. Children say that but the gap between the person in the close country or a faraway country is a lot smaller. Now this is pretty surprising, most research historically has been that children are very parochial but we've got a little bit of data that's starting to suggest that maybe it's not to the same degree that we thought. Does that suggest that somehow this is deeply embedded in the human psyche? And how are we to interpret that from an evolutionary perspective?

Well you can take a straightforward, genetical point of view. If you increase the ability of yourself or of your elders to reproduce, those genes will spread. But I think it's not necessarily like that they're reciprocal altruism is really at the front every every religion as far as I'm aware and I have to say I was once secularist of the year so I was obviously no expert on the subject. Didn't you also rewrite the Bible? I did rewrite the Bible. I got it right. Yeah. It was quite uncanny that the structure of the Bible and the

structure of the origin of species are remarkably similar they start off with origins and they end up with mysterious stuff which you don't understand and the only time the word evolve is in the origin of species it's the very last word in the book so the the idea of evolution, which I often think of as the grammar of biology, genetics is the spelling of biology, but the grammar of putting it all together is evolutionary grammar. And so the theory of evolution has a lot in common with other theories of life in general. It's noticeable that all religions, for example, somewhere have

the phrase that means unto others. Now that's what they do unto others, you would have them do unto you. And that's reciprocal altruism. Unfortunately, different religions, of course, hate the other religions, so that has problems of its own. But the universality, all the way from Buddhism to to to African religions of this unto others unto others of your own tribe at least is a statement that altruism is at the very base of being Human so are we saying that essentially to live in a group that you need something that looks like altruism Yeah, and I suppose the following question is does that then extend to other species you mentioned chimpanzees, but maybe Birds, you know elephants think things that live in groups

Yeah, most things in living groups have some altruistic behaviors elephants have a lot of altruistic behaviors. They care Grandmothers care for grand grandchildren or grand elephants and the kids never forget it. So grand elephants. And the kids never forget it. So when it comes to altruism there's a lot of it about. Is that linked though, because I suppose you're looking after a family group you can see. Well it doesn't, being a family group helps but it doesn't always work. I mean you know plenty of families have people hate each other but I think it's silly to apply the rules that apply to, let's say, fruit flies with altruism, or a good example is some insects, when the male is mated with the female in a crickets, for example, it's very altruistic because the female then turns around and eats the male. Now that's very generous of the male, but it's not doing very much good to his prospects for life,

but it is allowing his genes a bigger chance of surviving so that's generous was he being slow no it's just gonna say I've often wondered where the phrase no good deed ever goes unpunished comes from sounds like it applies there I want to Matthew about there yeah again going back to that definition of altruism and then empathy, for instance, which is, you know, everything that Steve was just talking about there, it seems this is part of what you might call the pattern of nature, but not necessarily the choice.

I suppose to me altruism suggests there are various different permutations and that you have to consciously make some form of decision whereas when we hear about ants for instance sacrificing themselves that seems to be more like the program of existence. So I think that you're right but I think that it's not maybe as clear as out of the line at least between humans and animals as we're talking about here so a lot of the time when we're behaving altruistically as people to other people we're doing so because of our feelings so you know because of a drive and and you know especially if you talk to for example heroic rescuers, so people who've gone and saved somebody from a building or a flood or things like

that, often they talk about acting from intuition. So they they just felt like it was the right thing to do and there's a lot of the way in which we behave pro-socially to others seems to be guided by our intuitions and and this is fantastic in many ways, right? It's wonderful that we can empathize with and care for people. But the cost of this, of course, are that it's easier to empathize with and care for people who are similar to us. And so when we donate money to disaster relief,

it's people often donate more to places that are similar to them. So I know we all know about the wildfires and stuff happening at the moment over in California. And it seems that, you know, a lot of people are feeling very empathic and very compassionate towards those people and they want to help. But we don't necessarily see that happening for people

in places that might be a little bit further away, either physically or emotionally from us. And so I think a lot of altruism is sort of intuitive and driven. But then there's also, we can also make the choice to kind of overcome those biases and say, well, even though these people are different from me or they live far away, we can overcome that and make the decision to behave altruistically and compassionately towards them as well. I'm Nicola Coughlin. This is history's youngest heroes. Rebellion, risk and the radical power of youth. She thought, right, I'll just do it. She thought about others rather than herself.

12 stories of extraordinary young people from across history. There's a real sense of urgency in them. That resistance has to be mounted, it has to be mounted now. Listen on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. or wherever you get your podcasts. Has there been any research on whether women are more altruistic than men? Would you like to warrant a guess? Yeah, I know it's going to be men the way you're looking at me, but is it women?

So a lot of the work is around empathy and in self-reported empathy measures at least women are consistently much higher than men women report being more compassionate so anything where you have self-report you see women at much higher rates of compassion and altruism and this is even from young children so actually it's women and it... Thank you. But that... All right Robin Ince. No I am fine. You're a nasty piece of work. I've slid down the helter-skelter of being an alpha male all of a sudden. It makes me think about culture as well, because empathy and altruism, there seems to be a crossover there. But surely I would say the difference is altruism is an action and empathy is an emotion Yeah, and you do I think very often notice more in terms of women in terms of empathy in terms of

Broaching and asking people, you know how they feel and that whole thing seems to widen the possibility of also thinking well How can I help you and being nurturers? I suppose because traditionally well how can I help you? I'm being nurturers I suppose because traditionally we women did bring up the kids didn't they long time ago Steve didn't they I know it's not like that so much these days but that was a tradition wasn't it? You were a nurse for a long time would you? For ten years yeah but a mental health nurse so a bit different I didn't have any empathy whatsoever. But you know. That's just to answer the question. Having worked in mental health and had to deal with some very extreme situations, do you feel there is a level of altruism that you are, it's not just a

job? No, it's definitely not just a job but I found that most people that went either into psychiatry or worked as mental health nurses already had some experience of a member of the family or you know a friend or someone they knew having mental health problems. I think what that did for them was it enabled them to be more empathetic because they weren't quite so scared because I think in in the olden days people were frightened. You know, if you remember the sort of pictures that the tabloids used to publish of, what's the name of that boxer?

Was it Frank Bruno? Yeah, just making people look really scary when in fact, you know, there was no reason to, apart from to be sensationalist. So I would say, like my dad had a terrible mental health problem, so in a way, oh god I'm so simplistic, and I kind of feel that I sort of went into that field to try and cheer my dad up in some sort of subconscious way, but obviously as I'm not that intelligent it might be more sophisticated than that, but I doubt it. So yeah, you know, I think there's interesting reasons people have for doing

it and I think empathy has already started in a way and they are those sort of people before they do it. Ignore Sister Ratchet in One Flow of the Cuckoo's Nest, okay? However simplistic or not, I don't think, yeah, that bit of, especially if you've watched someone else in pain when you're growing up, it seems to me that that would influence your desire to help other people who might be experiencing the same thing. Yeah, I think so, and I think also I'd make a case for there being so many different variables. Like when you were saying, Mat Matty about sort of like either donating a kidney or whatever it is if if it's if it's someone close to

you you're automatically going to do that and I think but if you've done that for someone you know that will that will kind of pass on will it not sort of like a chain of meaning the kidney donation chain like a chain of... Meaning the kidney donation chain? Yes, a chain of empathy or yeah, yeah. Yeah so I think if you know, so a friend of mine actually did this, made a non-directed kidney donation and I think he did it because he had seen other people doing it and he thought well this seems like a really altruistic kind thing that I can do to extend somebody's life and save somebody's life at what sounds like a huge cost to you but when you look into

the science and the data there's actually a minimal health impacts after the surgery and all of that and so I think he kind of thought well why wouldn't I do it and that probably wouldn't come about had he not heard about other people who had also done this. Matty from a scientific perspective you study let's say you study society is there a figure of merit you can attach? Can you say, can you measure how altruistic a certain society is? Can you rank them? So there's a little bit of work that has done things like this. There's some work on the moral circle. So the moral circle basically describes who we do and don't think of as worthy of moral concern. So beings that you do think of as worthy of moral concern go inside your moral circle and beings that you don't are outside

and there's been some work for example looking at how Expansive different people's moral circles are across all these different societies and you'll have some societies have more expensive moral circles and some have more contracted Of course, that's only one definition of altruism So you also might want to look at things like you know How much people want to share in these kinds of dictator games things like that? And so you do see country-level variants in sort of how altruistic people are but I think it can be very hard to say whether something is more or less moral or more or less altruistic but you do see quite a lot of variability. We tend to assume don't we that the more altruistic a society is

the happier it is the more successful it is. The question is is that correct first of all? I think there's a classic example which shows that which is is blood donation, okay, and transfusion. Now in the US it's expensive. Blood donors get paid, they get paid a lot, an awful lot of them are or were, it's better controlled now, but it put a long time, a lot of them were drug addicts, they had HIV, they had various other diseases, but because the transfusion business was a business which made large profits, they just took these people in and hanged the expense. Whereas here in Britain, and indeed in much of Europe, it's genuine altruism, okay.

In many things I score B plus in many endeavors and and B plus is actually my blood group blood group B research plus makes me feel very warm but second-rate inside and I used to give blood I'm too old now they don't want my bloody blood anymore but and the fact that you can expect to get a free safe blood transfusion in this country and many others but not in the US and elsewhere where they pay for blood transfusions is a statement that altruism works better. A little bit of work showing that if you did start paying people, I think this might have been done in Australia, if you start paying people for their blood donations it actually like can reduce the amount that they donate because their intrinsic motivation is taken away

and so coming back to this idea of you know pure alt pure altruism, what we were talking about earlier, sometimes having things like the financial incentive can demotivate people to behave altruistically. One of the study that I mentioned earlier, one of the things that predicted being morally expensive between countries was having, it's not GDP or finance, but it's having sort of trust in society and high belief in the fabric of society and kind of feeling supported

and cared for by other members of society. And so it's not as pure of a metric as like the amount of money in terms of success, but it certainly seems like people who are in these kind of high trust societies where they feel supported are going to behave more altruistically or they're going to be more morally expensive. Well, I suppose what I'm trying to get to is play devil's advocate and say, is it necessarily the case that the more altruistic a society is, the better the society is. Is this because you've earned so much you might start dodging your tax? Is there any research into that? I mean I think yes I mean the countries with the highest life expectancy and the lowest infant mortality there's most of all the Scandinavian countries, much of Europe, and then small parts of Africa,

which is single tribes. I spent some time in Botswana. I remember when I got to Botswana, I landed in South Africa, which is still during the days of apartheid. And I got to the Botswana border, and the chap stopped me and put me a passport and he said, is this the first time you have been to Botswana, sir? And I said, oh yeah it is. He said, do not worry sir, this is the Hampstead of Africa. And he was dead right, it was the Hampstead of Africa. It was a single tribe, the Setswana, nearly all Setswana, and they had a good health service. I was working in university, a very good education service. So you can, altruistic societies work.

And I think that's really basically a simple observation, and it's generally true. I'd quite like to know which is the most altruistic country in the world then? Poof. Are you going to make one up? The answer is I don't know. I mean my guess would be somewhere like I think Norway is the problem just about as altruistic as you get. But you see that's it, go to Norway, there's nothing else to do apart from being altruistic. You certainly can't afford to get drunk, that's a bloody shame.

From your research, if you were to make recommendations for how society can better function in this respect, what would those recommendations be? So I guess, can I just preface this by saying it's actually really hard to get people to be altruistic. There's a lot of work into this and it's really, really challenging and it seems like some of the biggest barriers are especially in developmental work with kids cost. So once something is so for example young children if you bring them into a an experiment and you say you know

There's a child coming into the museum later who won't get any stickers and you've given them some stickers Would you like to share? Children from about four years of age say that they should share their stickers equally But it's not until about eight years that children will actually do that. And so it's quite challenging when there's personal cost involved to get people to be altruistic. So I would definitely say make it much easier to be altruistic. So make it easy for people to be altruistic. And I think something that we should acknowledge is that it's really a position of privilege to be able to help others.

If people are functioning well, it will be easier for them to be altruistic to others. But I think one of the biggest things and this is a real challenge is changing social norms. So if you can encourage people to create norms where giving money to charity or being kind to others is what you see around them that's going to have a huge impact on how much we are willing to do that ourselves. I know when we had Helen Sharman on a while ago and she was talking about the thing that she learned most Well before and after she went into space was when she went to Russia she had gone

Kind of living that late 80s early 90s, you know I've got a fast car and I've got a motorbike and I've got this and then she went there and she found out how little Compared to in the UK there was in Russia But how everyone asked when they asked how you were, they really wanted to know how are you. And she said that was the biggest lesson. I was wondering, we've talked a lot about numbers, but when we were sitting this afternoon just chatting about it, and we were thinking a lot about Dunbar's number, we were thinking

of that thing that 150 people is, you know, for a whole community and for everyone you're going to meet in your life, that's kind of the optimum amount to be able to build relationships, however minor that person is in your life. And I mean, are we looking also with altruism? Would we be able to say, yes, the larger the model you get, the harder it is to find altruism there? I mean, Robin Dunbar came up with that theory a long time ago. The number was somewhat plucked from the air, I have to say. There's. It was something the number was somewhat plucked from the air I have to say there's obviously a limit to the number of people you can know and individually help I don't know 150 people good God. They know you

I've been to those pubs There's actually a bit of work on this so things like scoping sensitivity or something called the identifiable victim effect So for scoping sensitivity, it's the idea that as we start to deal with bigger and bigger numbers, we're not really able to understand the scope. And so we don't have, for example, saving 100 lives is great. Saving 150 lives should be that percentage increase,

but we don't get that much more reward from it. And so we're actually not very good, both in terms of thinking about altruism, but also thinking about suffering. And so there's something called the identifiable victim effect which shows that if you give people sort of images of little children and say oh you know these children are sick and they need money so that we can cure them of their disease. So if you show an individual child or a group of eight children people will actually give more

money to the individual child than they will to the group of eight because it's easier to relate to that individual child and you can identify that victim. So there's quite a lot of work showing that bigger numbers are not very good for us in terms of understanding the suffering and understanding the need for altruism. What was that line by Stalin? It's not very specific. Do you know what, this is just my audition for the reboot of quote unquote. The death of one is a tragedy. The death of one is a tragedy. The death of one is a tragedy, but the death of millions are just a statistic.

Alright, nice guy. Joel, I have to ask this as well because you've been in stand-up for 15, 20 years now or so and stand-up comics sometimes we've seen those versions in kind of, you know, movies and perhaps green rooms as well where they can seem cruel and this kind of thing. What do you feel in terms of the altruism or generosity of stand-ups this reminds me of a line someone did I think early 90s and I'm not gonna say who it was we don't want to get them into trouble but I thought it was funny they, oh I see Mother Teresa has just retired at the age of 80, lazy cow. I mean that's actually, I think that what that shows is how amazing people think she was in a way.

You know, because there wouldn't really be much of a reaction and that's what comics do. I don't think, I think, I think the problem, the problem with today and social media is that it's, that altruism is performative these days and if you're being altruistic and you've got two hundred thousand followers on Instagram, that's very different isn't it? Because we were sort of always taught that if you if you do something good for someone Don't go around boasting about it or that ruins it really the problem with that is if you're Altruistic and embarrassed about it and you give millions to a charity and don't tell anyone how they ever gonna know But it's an interesting thing because I think of someone like George Michael and it seems that since he died more and more things have come out about his generosity as a human being and you know buying John Lennon's white piano just so he could then send it to different places like hospitals and places where people are covering because he knew that I had this kind of mystical thing and that was all done with no sense of this is my story. Just I've got lots of money and I want to do something good with it

And that seems to be a real purity and kind of beauty and things like that Matty I think that's completely true But I also coming back to this discussion before we're having about how to encourage people to be more altruistic If you don't tell anybody about it, then it doesn't become a social norm. And so I'm torn because I agree I think there's something really off-putting about performative altruism Especially if you think that the person is not genuine in their motivations but on the other hand if the help is there and things are getting better because of it then I think that's a good thing too so it's not really a simple answer in my mind. I think one way that we're moving is one thing I

think encourages people to be more altruistic is personalizing it. So whereas you know you would be asked to say donate to a charity for food in Africa, now you can you can do it in so many ways you know you can you actually get a named family and you can sort of buy something for them and you know what they're doing. I think that makes a big difference. Or you can get them a goat. I've always liked the idea of that. No one's got me one yet but maybe one day. After this you're suddenly gonna go, I wish I'd mentioned that bloody goat thing. I'm gonna have to get a bigger garden now, aren't I?

We've run out of time. No, we haven't. You told me time is a fiction. It's been going as long as we want according to the laws of physics. The summary, disappointingly for me, it seems we've got a very simple summary, which is that altruism is good. It's a good thing. I was hoping there'd be at least something that suggested that it was not a good idea. Does anyone want to disagree with that? It's a good thing. Welcome to the moral maze. Human kindness, good or bad. So, we asked the audience a question, didn't we, Brian? We did. What is the least? See this is good

This is at least negative At least some darkness here. What's the least altruistic thing they've ever done? Joe what have you got? In a restaurant played football with the last pork chop Only for it to be the last pork chop ordered. What does that even mean? for it to be the last pork chop ordered. Very sad story. What does that even mean? This is a good tip, this one. So to get out of a festival car park I put on a hi-vis jacket to stop the traffic and get my car out. Good idea. Can I just read this one out because I've got all the weird ones. Volunteering as a scout leader five years ago because I fancied the lady who ran the group. Oh there she is. And we're on our third date this evening.

What three dates in five years? LAUGHTER That sounds like my kind of relationship. I'm not going to say your name, just in case. Well, the second date might have been involving, like, tying knots. And they go, I just got out. LAUGHTER I ran a half marathon but didn't raise any money for charity. LAUGHTER

Well done, you. I was looking for darkness right. I used my dad's disability to get rugby World Cup tickets. Right so thank you very much to our panel Matti Wilkes, Steve Jones and Joe Brand. Next week, we are very excitedly looking at the best process of cryogenically freezing Brian so that every generation can enjoy looking at his perfectly preserved nose and head. It's not actually. Well, it is. It's kind of. What we're actually doing is we're doing a show all about the science of ice.

But I thought, while we've got experts there who know how to freeze stuff, it might be nice to just freeze you. The more urgent question is how to preserve you, isn't it? I mean, we've got to do this. Anyway, thank you so much for joining us and we'll see you next time. Bye bye. APPLAUSE MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC

MUSIC Turned out nice again. Hello, Russell Kane here. I used to love British history, be proud of it. Henry VIII, Queen Victoria, massive fan of stand-up comedians, obviously, Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor, that has become much more challenging,

for I am the host of BBC Radio 4's Evil Genius, the show where we take heroes and villains from history and try to work out were they evil or genius. Do not catch up on BBC sounds by searching Evil Genius if you don't want to see your heroes destroyed. But if like me you quite enjoy it, have a little search. Listen to Evil Genius with me, Russell Kane. Go to BBC Sounds and have your world destroyed. I'm Nicola Coughlin. This is history's youngest heroes. Rebellion, risk and the radical power

of youth. She thought, right, I'll just do it. She thought about others rather than herself. Twelve stories of extraordinary young people from across history. There's a real sense of urgency in them. That resistance has to be mounted, it has to be mounted now. Listen on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.