Helping Others, Helping Ourselves

Here's a true story: Star Wars fan Josh Weisleberg had polycystic kidney disease, a hereditary condition; his kidneys were failing, he was on dialysis, and the waiting list for a new kidney was-and is-long. Josh had exchanged emails with other Star Wars fan on an online forum for collectors; at one point he mentioned his condition. Subsequently, Barry Benecke II--another collector on the online forum, who knew Josh only by his screen name--offered to donate his own kidney to Josh. Barry was a match, and the operation was successful.

Why did Barry want to give one of his kidneys to a man he'd never met? Barry explains that he'd recently loss a number of people close to him, all from different types of cancer: his mother, the daughter of a friend, a good friend, his wife's uncle. "It was because of losing those folks that I was compelled to try to help someone else. The first person who I found that I might be able to help was Josh." Josh notes "Everybody likes the heroics and people trying to do good and make the galaxy safe. When you translate that to everyday life, you have folks trying to live that...Barry is a hero for sure...He's Luke Skywalker." (Click here for more information about their story. Selfless behavior wasn't new to either of these men; they both belong to the 501st Legion, an international organization of Star Wars fans who enjoy putting on Star Wars costumes and doing good works such as running in marathons for charities, and wearing their costumes to entertain children in hospitals.)

The same selflessness motivated another 501st Legion member, Eric Seeman, to donate one of his kidney's to fellow Legion member, Jeff Romanoff, who had kidney cancer (click here and here to find out more about that story). Romanoff wrote, "Eric is a true hero and emulates everything Star Wars is about. A wonderful, selfless friend, putting his life on the line, so I may see my son grow up."

Barry's and Eric's selfless behavior falls under the category of what psychologists call prosocial behavior, actions that are directed to help others. Common examples include sharing, cooperating, comforting, and giving assistance. Why do people behave in these ways? What light can psychological theories and research shed in helping us understand why Barry and Eric gave of themselves-literally?

Psychologists divide possible motives for helping others into two groups (click here for an article by Daniel Batson on the subject) :

1. People help others because doing so allows them to attain some goal for themselves, referred to as egoism;
2. People help others because they want to improve the welfare of others, referred to as altruism.

The first type of motive covers a wide ranges of situations and experiences. In addition to the more obvious ones (e.g., that the helper collects a "chit" so that the person helped may feel the need to "pay back" the helper at some later point, or that the helper's status increases in other people's eyes), people may also help to relieve their own negative emotions in a situation--such as distress, guilt, or sadness; helping relieves those feelings. Solicitations for donations to help children with cleft palates may motivate people to donate because seeing photographs of children with this problem leads the viewer to feel sad or distressed for the children; donating money lessens these uncomfortable feelings.

Among superheroes, Peter Parker's decision to help others as Spider-Man seems to stem from egoism; he became a superhero, at least in part, to relieve the terrible burden of guilt he felt about being (indirectly) responsible for his Uncle Ben's death. Although this type of motive may seem less "noble" than the second type, the helping behaviors that result from this motive are still helpful to others and shouldn't be thought of negatively simply because the helper had less altruistic reasons for helping.

The second type of motive can arise when we feel sympathy or compassion for others. For instance, some of us may respond to the photo of the child with a cleft palate with a deep sense of empathy and compassion for the child, and want to help-donate-simply to improve that child's lot in life. Among superheroes, Wonder Woman's reason for being a superhero fits this description-she helps others simply because their suffering--or potential suffering--touches a chord within her and she feels compelled to act on their behalf. Altruism was at work when Barry and Eric each decided to donate their kidney.

My reaction to hearing about Barry and Eric's generosity was probably similar to yours: I felt humbled and awed and wanted to perform some "good work." Psychologists refer to the feeling that I had--and that people have when they witness or hear about other's altruistic acts--as elevation, a term first used by Thomas Jefferson to describe the desire to do charitable acts in response to seeing an act of charity performed by another.

Psychologists are investigating the extent to which the feeling of elevation translates into actual helping behavior. We may feel great by hearing about or witnessing other people's good works, but does it change our behavior? The handful of studies investigating this question suggests that it does (click here for an overview of this topic. For research papers, click here and here).

Might superhero stories--in which the superhero clearly acts heroically--induce a sense of elevation in readers or viewers? If research found that they do, it would be interesting to see whether reading an appropriate comic book story induces more, less, or the same amount of elevation as does watching a superhero cartoon or movie. (Ideally, to minimize confounding factors, the storyline should be the same across the media portrayals.) Perhaps (some) superhero stories don't just teach moral behavior; maybe they also induce people to help others through elevation. Wouldn't that be super!

[Thanks for Stephen Sansweet of Lucasfilm for telling me about the remarkable story of Barry, Josh, Eric, and Jeff, and to Mary Franklin of Bantha Tracks for her reporting of them in Star Wars Insider.]

Copyright 2010 by Robin S. Rosenberg. All rights reserved.

Robin S. Rosenberg is a clinical psychologist. Her website is DrRobinRosenberg.com. Click here to take her brief What is a Superhero? Survey.

Why Are Superheroes All the Rage?

When talking about superheroes, I sometimes get asked why I think that superheroes have become so popular and part of the mainstream culture. As part of my answer, I list the impact of 9/11 on the American psyche—and perhaps on the psyche of people in other countries: That 9/11 led Americans to feel acutely vulnerable—on our soil—in a way we hadn’t before.

In the aftermath of 9/11, I hypothesized, we began to yearn for larger-than-life protection from the ever-present concerns about threats to safety. Superhero stories fulfill that yearning, at least temporarily. (I include the television show 24 in this category, although Jack Bauer is neither from another planet nor a mutant—that we know of. He is a superhero in that: (1) he has the superabilities of being able to keep going in the face of inordinate amounts of pain, and without being a psychopath he is able to inflict pain on others without, apparently, much of an emotional cost; and (2) he is portrayed as acting heroically, against impossible odds, repeatedly making enormous personal sacrifices to save others. I could go on about this, but it’s a tangent to the topic of this blog post.)

To support my hypothesis, I point to the phenomenal success of (super)heroic shows and film that aired soon after 9/11:

• 24 (first aired 11/6/2001),
• Smallville (first aired 10/16/2001), and,
• the first Spiderman film (released May, 2002).

My view is that our affinity for superheroes generalizes to all things super--even to the use of the adjective or prefix, super. I wanted to collect some data to support this hypothesis. I predicted that the use of the prefix super (e.g., Super Jumbo, super quiz, super transit) increased after 9/11. So, I did a Google News Archive Search for the term super* from 1937 to 2010. The results are below (and here in your browser).

This set of data doesn't seem to support my hypothesis. However, if you look at the data more closely (in your browser, looking at each decade in detail), you may notice, as I did, that there is always a huge spike in January of each year. I investigated further—turns out those were articles on the Super Bowl. Looking closely at the decade by decade data, there are also spikes related to Super Tuesday, super collider, and Super Mario. So, I tailored my search to omit results that included bowl, Tuesday, collider, and Mario. The results are below (and you can peruse them yourself in more detail by clicking here.)

Okay, looks good for my hypothesis. I then examined the decade 2000-2009 in more detail, as you can see below (and here in your browser). Sure enough, my hypothesis was correct, although the month-by-month bar graph suggests that it took about a year or two for the use of the term to increase reliably and persistently.

Unfortunately, this Google News Archive Search doesn’t provide numerical data, but it at least provide confirmation of a trend, and of my hypothesis. For more information about Google New Archives Search, click here.

The Liberation of Anonymity, Part I

Sorry for taking so long to blog again…been up to my ears in work, but in the future, I will post at least monthly (at the beginning of each month).

Last week, I was part of a symposium at Ashland University; we panelists addressed the question: What is a (Super)hero? Joining me on the panel were Tom DeFalco (current writer and former editor-in-chief at Marvel Comics) and Mark D. White, editor of Batman and Philosophy; Ashland history professor, John Moser, did a great job moderating the panel.

Before the panel, I had a chance to ask Tom DeFalco his opinion about a particular aspect of the alter-ego relationship between Peter Parker and Spiderman. Some background first: I've been doing some reading and thinking (and soon, some writing) on the topic of alter-egos. I've been thinking about what it would be like to be Peter Parker, and then to become Spiderman—to go swinging around the city, cracking wise, acting with derring-do—and then to go back to being Peter Parker. It's the going back to being Peter Parker that's stumped me. I imagined that, for the most part, being Spiderman was liberating. How could he then stuff this big personality (as Spiderman) back into the contained and relatively demure Peter Parker?

Tom helped me see the situation differently. First, he suggested that Peter Parker's appearance is deceiving: Basically, he lets himself be dressed by his aunt. Taking Tom's point a step further, in a way, his Peter Parker clothes are a kind of costume. They make him appear more nerdy or geeky than he actually is (although clearly he's very bright, being bright isn't the same as being nerdy or geeky). Riffing on what Tom said about this, there's a sense in which Parker's high school persona isn't dissimilar to Clark Kent's—the nerdish exterior hides a different personality underneath. (More food for thought in that, I think.)

Back to Tom: He also pointed out that, in fact, Peter Parker often has witty retorts to people, but these comebacks often go over everyone's heads. So Parker and Spiderman are similar in their dry, smart-ass sense of humor, but Parker (at least the high school version) is surrounded by people who don't get his jokes. Spiderman's villains are generally smarter than average, and so more likely to get his jokes. Extending this point, that fact that Parker has a different sense of humor than that of people around him heightens the sense of his being different than his peers (e.g., nerdy/geeky).

Tom's third point about PP/Spiderman was that wearing a mask can be very liberating, and can lead people to act differently—or in more extreme ways—than their usual selves. Tom said he'd talked to people who have gone around wearing masks (e.g., "real life superheroes"), who described the experience as being very liberating.

This last comment of Tom's got me thinking about the something I was pondering over the summer—the ways that the internet allow people to electronically wear a mask (that is, to be anonymous, or a different persona) and how it changes—or can change—our behavior. Just read comments on any newspaper, magazine, or blog website to see proof of how anonymity, or the ability to hide our identity by assuming another one, does change how people behave. The most vitriolic comments are likely to be from people who are not identified by their real names. For some people, the anonymity afforded by an internet mask leads people to let go of some—or all—of the restraint they impose on themselves in their everyday lives.

Psychologists have examined an aspect of this phenomenon that typically happens not over the internet, but in actual face-to-face encounters where otherwise law-abiding citizens lose their moral restraint. One situation in which this occurs is among soccer fans who, after their team has lost, take to the field and become violent. Psychologist explain the underlying phenomenon as deindividuation: the loss of sense of self that occurs when people in a group are anonymous—not seen as individuals and their identities are unknown to others in the group.

More about deindividuation in my next post.