Stress hormone reduces altruistic behavior in empathetic people | Hacker News Reader

Stress hormone reduces altruistic behavior in empathetic people

neurosciencenews.com

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While not a substitution for scientific study, I always knew this.

When people are comfortable themselves, they tend to be more kind, understanding, and altruistic.

I also suspect that this is also a long-term phenomena as opposed to the short-term implications featured in this study.

When growing up, I have seen those people become altruistic, helpful, and have more bandwidth for other people’s mistakes first who started earning comfortably first.

My theory is this- being socio-economically comfortable with peace in mind makes you more tolerant, altruistic, and kind overall.

Thus study mentions only "empathetic" people. But I think this goes beyond them.

Since "socio-economically comfortable" is relative (some people are socio-economically comfortable with much less than other people) I'd argue it does not go beyond the general notion of "empathetic people"

Competition kills generosity.

Competition also makes the world go round

Nope, it's gravity.

And cooperation. Humans have risen above other species because of their cooperative approach (eg. sharing knowledge by passing it through language, forming communities with broader goals to protect the entire group, etc).

This is pretty evident in all the stories of those children raised by animals in the wild: none of them develop much past their animal caretakers.

You could say the competition lies in maintaining and creating new relationships, in order to be able to cooperate well

But competition is how we get out of local maxima, disruptive improvements needs competition, they don't happen through cooperation.

For example, lets say you have a better way to make pots. You show it to people, but nobody listens, they think that their way of making pots is better. How do you actually help them get benefit from your discovery? Well, you set up a competition, so it can be clear to everyone which way is best. Then you beat the old way of making pots, they have to admit that they were wrong and now everyone benefits (except the old pot makers who now has to relearn their things and lose their status as masters).

Competition in the natural world is typically zero sum. In the human world cooperation and competition aren't mutually exclusive, and in fact we tend to build societies that leverage competition for mutual gain--i.e. cooperative competition. In any event, I think the point is that [altruistic, non-kin, systemic] cooperation is the distinguishing characteristic of the human species, not that it's the only dynamic at play or even the one that predominates across all discrete social interactions.

Very nicely put, that was exactly my point.

> Competition in the natural world is typically zero sum.

Evolution itself can be seen as a positive sum. Without it, even single-celled organisms would not exist.

Evolution, through natural selection, can be seen as driven by competion between pieces of information (genes), much more than it is competition between individuals. (all individuals die eventually, so for them the game may be zero sum).

Similarily, competition within human culture also produce positive (or in some cases negative) sum effects that need to be closely tied to individuals, but more often to memes/ideas (and sometimes, still, genes).

When Henry Ford introduced the assembly line, he did benefit personally (some of the profit was spent on introducing a minimum wage and 5 day work week), but soon, competition would force everyone to use the same idea.

Depending on your point of view, this can be seen as positive sum (increased productivity, less work) or negative (fewer and more boring jobs in manufacturing).

> competition is how we get out of local maxima

Careful. The prisoner's dilemma shows us that competition can drive the system to the globally worst outcome.

Competition and cooperation aren't polar opposites, though.

Mutually cooperating teams / tribes / nations / organizations often find themselves in competition with other mutually cooperating teams / tribes etc.

Competition is definitely a huge incentive to innovate, though it also may lead you astray.

An extreme version of competition is ... war. And right now we see the dynamic develop: dozens of NATO and NATO-adjacent countries cooperate with one another and with Ukraine so that Ukraine may "compete" on the battlefield with a stronger neighbour, Russia. Cooperation and competition by proxy.

Russia tries to counter that by building its own cooperation team, but finds almost no significant volunteers to team with, except Belarus.

> Competition is definitely a huge incentive to innovate

Citation needed.

Competition and generosity are unrelated. Many cultures in fact have competitions in which status is gained by being more generous. Perhaps the most iconic is the potlatch[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch

Generosity kills competition

It’s certainly a privilege to be generous, almost by definition; you have to _have_ in order to _give_, abstractly. Whether the currency is in the form of self-esteem, wealth, status, etc.

One of the most important things I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older. I just lived in my comfortable bubble growing up so of course it was easy to be “nice”. Of course I still believe we should always maintain a civil standard, but I understand now rudeness’ usually sad origins so to speak (emotional pain from abuse, life, whatever).

Though I've seen some amazing people who have very little still being generous.

And I have also seen crises wear down good people and turn them into ungenerous wrecks of themselves.

In the end, what I learned is that people are people, and I really can't judge anything by the cover. I have no idea what else is going on with someone, or their character and capacity to meet great hardships. And even if they have little capacity ... they are still people.

How well that holds up in my own moments of crises? I can do a lot better.

I wish I could up-vote this comment more than once.

We had an interesting experience with this recently.

A butcher accidentally added an extra zero and charged us $640 instead of $64 for our purchase. We realized a few days later when I noticed our credit card spend looks strangely high for the month.

We're regulars so the next time we were there we said "Hey it looks like you overcharged us last week. Can you fix it? We got x,y,z and it doesn't sound like that adds up to $640??"

The butcher people were super apologetic, reviewed their numbers, and refunded us. They specifically said "Wow you're so nice about this! Most people would be shouting and screaming and going crazy"

We're fortunate enough that a hiccup like that isn't a big deal. Plenty of credit card balance to buffer the hiccup and if worst comes to worst, we can issue a chargeback. And if even that doesn't work, eh we'll be unhappy but fine.

I would have just chargebacked immediately when reviewing the card statement

Like an ongoing gameshow of Jeopardy: bzzt wrong price

And then maybe contacted them to do it again

But I definitely wouldn't have been confrontational either, I’m surprised people would bother being aggressive about it, maybe if they used a debit card or were broke/illiquid

You familiar with how shitty card companies make that for vendors when you charge back?

Not everyone would want to do that to their weekly butcher shop.

I don't think the butcher shop would agree to be their weekly butcher shop anymore if they pulled that shit.

I wouldn't. Granted, Steam or Amazon pulling an entire account over one chargeback, as has been reported of both, remains bullshit. But dragging a small shop into that process without even trying to fix the problem with a friendly conversation? That's a customer I'm probably happy to fire.

I’m familiar, so dont fuck up

The American way, god forbid you ever make a mistake.

>I’m familiar, so dont fuck up

Don't.

Quite possibly the only time I've seen on HN where correcting someone's grammar is actually making a salient point in the discussion. Well done.

I assume all software you've ever written has been bug free?

Good luck charging back a card-present transaction after a week.

I have successfully charged back a card-present transaction after multiple months with US Bank.

Was it a chargeback (i.e. a fraudulent transaction) or services not rendered (i.e. faulty product etc.).

Services not rendered and it was based on a bait and switch with a rental company. I had to send in documentation and receipts but I got my money back in the end.

Seems a bit unnecessary. You could easily use the opportunity to build a better relationship through kindness. In an exclusively self-interest-maximizing sense, doing this yields better long-term outcomes for a short term cost of one-week float of some insignificant cash and the discomfort of asking.

You're entitled to it. It just seems irrational from a self-interest-maximizing sense, and definitely irrational to me who just feels pretty good about letting people undo a perfectly undoable error.

This doesn’t have much to do with altruism or empathy. In your case: well-to-do people get more in return from managing their reputation as upstanding folks than the they would get from throwing a fit over something that they might only need to get fixed within the month. In the case of poorer people: they might have to pay rent today with that money, so their manners might go out of the window somewhat due to stress (getting mad because of someone else’s mistake doesn’t have to do with lacking empathy or altruistic feeling).

> their manners might go out of the window somewhat due to stress

Isn’t this the whole premise of the article we’re commenting on?

See my parenthetical...

> (getting mad because of someone else’s mistake doesn’t have to do with lacking empathy or altruistic feeling)

If anything it makes me more sympathetic of those who do get angry. If being nice to people is more a product of one's privilege than one's nature, who am I to judge those who flip out when they're counting down the days to their next paycheck.

Well it’s a bit of both right? Stress makes it harder to be nice, especially existential stress. But lack of stress doesn’t automatically make you a good person. You still have to consciously decide to do the right/nice/polite thing.

There’s a lot of not-well-off people who are super nice because it’s faster than being confrontational. And there’s plenty of entitled assholes who think being well-off means they can shit on people.

Exactly.

> "But lack of stress doesn’t automatically make you a good person."

This.

Lack of stress only makes it easier to be nice, and stress makes it harder.

That does not mean that a person without stress is automatically nice, and stressed out people are always rude and unkind.

The fact that this needs to be said out loud is weird.

Stress erodes our buffer against external shocks. We can't avoid all stresses in life, nor would we want to (some acutre stress is great), but chronic stress can consume any additional slack we have to deal responsibly with adverse events.

Sounds like a good excuse to make a plan to get ahead first before helping anyone.

What’s my five year plan? To ruthlessly beat my opposition so that I will be in a better place to help the needy. Actually scratch that—make it a fifteen year plan.

The world is not a zero-sum game like it was 250 years ago.

I am not a company in a low-margin, huge-scale business. I am a person. A human being. I do not need to "ruthlessly beat my opposition" to be happy and comfortable.

And a person is not a 2-tensor with two digits- altruism and success. My point is- when you are comfortable, content- no matter whether you earn money or not, or how much you earn, you tend to be more altruistic.

I concede that you must be a very altruistic and empathetic person.

This is how relative poverty is born. One man doing the work of ten, leaving nine with nothing to do but depend on the first.

If the first were to stop working once he has enough for himself, the other nine would be allowed to work for themselves.

Sounds like what Mao did in China 70 years ago lol

Seems like this could be a feedback cycle too. Be less kind to people and they'll treat you badly in return.

This is why ending poverty should be the number 1 priority of our society. It puts *everyone* in a better situation to collectively solve other problems.

I'm inclined to agree. Are you aware of the Poor People's Campaign? https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/

My sense is that it'll take action on the part of people who aren't activists to really shake things up, but the PPC seems like a start.

This is an issue I care deeply about, thanks for the link. I just donated.

Having said that...from their homepage: "The poo is immoral"

https://i.imgur.com/4Cay0Zw.png

It should be the number 1 priority, but at the same there have been multiple studies that show poor people are more likely to be altruistic than rich people.

Which is why the goal isn't to make everyone rich. It's to end poverty. Those aren't the same thing, exactly. Think like, Star Trek. They have ended poverty, but it's not by making everyone wealthy.

An interesting corollary of this is that comfortable and wealthy people are going to be nicer to you than poor people.

Isn’t this just to say, when your belly is full, and you see people suffering hunger, you don’t feel yourself threatened. If you have surplus, you can be generous of heart, spirit, and material, because your mind is not clouded by the emotions of your own suffering.

This study uses cortisol measurements to obscure the fact that one group was asked to do a stressful public speaking task first:

> Human participants (males and females) completed a charitable donation task before and after they underwent either a psychosocial stressor or a control manipulation, while their brain activity was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Most of these "cortisol does X" studies are deeply flawed because they try to pretend like cortisol is some independent variable, when really it's an artifact of having asked the people to do something stressful.

In this case, the study is best interpreted as "Certain people are less altruistic immediately after being forced to do a stressful public speaking task".

The abstract mentions about mentalizing ability being a predictor of prosocial giving. As someone a big low on that scale, I’m curious, maybe even a bit concerned, about the research behind that.

Yeah, the implied causation is weird. Do we know with certainty that cortisol causes a mental state?

So many comments here saying how obvious this is, but I'm personally surprised.

The people I know who haven't gone through tough times are the last ones I'd expect to help a friend in need. On the flip side, the people going through shit themselves always seem to be able to scrounge together resources and help out others in a similar situation.

Just compare the way homeless people, single mums or refugees all help each other out compared to upper-middle class professionals who get uncomfortable at the mere thought of genuinely helping a friend who's going through a tough time (no, brunch doesn't count!).

Direct link to article: Altruism under Stress: Cortisol Negatively Predicts Charitable Giving and Neural Value Representations Depending on Mentalizing Capacity

https://www.jneurosci.org/content/42/16/3445

Great line from Parasite:

"Even though she’s rich, she’s nice." "She’s nice _because_ she’s rich"

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/featu...

Seems pretty straight-forward. Empathy requires energy and if someone is under stress, they generally have less energy to worry about others.

I wonder if psychopathy/sociopathy/narcissism is the result of pro-longed inter-generational stress and isolation. Someone growing up say in a war zone and being exposed to violence constantly from a young age would be adapt to shut down empathy.

This is a very well known fact is psychology.

I don't have time right now to find and read the paper and try to evaluate the significance of the finding, but I hope someone else does.

I hope this is a reference to the title :)

Not intentionally! I am having a stressful day, but in this case the etiology has more to do with the press of demands on my time than with any direct effect of cortisol, I think.

The downvotes aren’t helping either. True in life too, stress can become a vicious cycle leading to disastrous outcomes. That’s why turning the other cheek, so to speak, sometimes can help break that cycle. Have an upvote!

I don't often notice downvotes by virtue of rarely spending extended time on HN, and don't stress out over them when I do notice them because, beyond expressing a nebulous and rarely actionable sense of community disapproval and changing a number on my profile, they don't provide any signal worth getting excited about. But thanks just the same, I suppose!

Narcissists are created either through abuse or never having their entitlement checked. They feed on creative or empathetic people through various devices. Having fallen into a well of victimization for the past few years I definitely struggle to stay in touch with my authentic altruistic self when every day has background stress on the magnitude of Fukishima. Maybe I'm learning Karmic lessons or being prepared for a future in a way God knows I can handle, but no doubt I'm not as altruistic as I used to be. At the most primal, I don't have security in my food or shelter or ability to get a stable income due to a fabricated history of violence in the courts by a corporate lawyer--non-violent felons have far more opportunity. So while I get small blessings that keep me alive, the only way I can spare a drop of energy or money to be altruistic is if I keep the spiritual rewards of giving in mind, so I give bottles of water or buy coffee for other homeless people when I can and record YouTube videos sharing what I'm learning when I can.

Perhaps only a tangential contribution, but yea, that's my anecdote on being altruistic while under extreme stress. I keep the pathways warm when I can and it's irrational except on a spiritual level.

Are the authors ignorant of the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system? Vasopressin reduces altruistic behavior in empathetic people. Cortisol clasically raises vasopressin.

Autism is characterized by low regulatory APVR2 (vasopressin receptor 2) function, leading to high baseline vasopressin and issues staying hydrated

Re hydration

Do you have any good reading on that link? Searched just now and there's a lot to wade through to find a good article

does he mean the body doesn't hydrate properly, or produce saliva? or water bottles?

Maybe lack of a thirst urge, which would match my autistic experience.

I mean that the body most won't respond to signals to reabsorb water from the bladder because of weak QVPR2 activity.

AVPR2 only shows up (significantly) in the kidneys. It pumps water back from the bladder to the bloodstream. AVPR1 and AVPR3 show up in the brain (and drive/control any hormonal response tied to water availability/quality/safety-to-access. Including territorial mammals marking territory.)

Vasopressin is actually a mirror-image of oxytocin, with a few hundred million years of divergent mutations. Unique to mammals. That's why mammals are the only vertebrates that independently, separately, regulate water and ions. (Thus, sweating, lactation, crying, uncalcified placenta vs egg, etc.)

So the brain keeps pumping out vasopressin (in response to dehydration-induced corticotropin-releasing factor). This leads to water "running right through". And high baseline vasopressin levels that go even higher with dehydration.

Less commonly, especially for men, the body overreacts to vasopressin. Excessive vasopressin 2 receptor efficacy or transcription leads to low baseline vasopressin. Low vasopressin 'magnifies' any oxytocin activity. Leads to "human-hyperstimulated" autism and high innate trust in unfearful situations. Also often leads to low territory/spatial mapping capacity.

This is what we're talking about.

A. Research dates back to the 90s. Thousands of researchers have added their perspectives.

B. Look at what vasopressin does, in humans and other mammals.

C. Consider that Vasopressin Receptor 2, is right by the X pseudoautosomal region, so is mutated 15x-20x more frequently. Compare how often you've seen other pseudoautosomal differences in people with Vasopressin transcription differences.

Or just start searching for random genes from around the pseudoautosomal region + autism. Transcription differences in one pseudoautosomal gene are so closely tied to differences in others, you see a very unusually high number of correlations between autism-uninvolved genes and autism. (Just as so many genes around TNF-alpha/6p21.3 are spuriously tied to autoinflammatory issues; major histocompatibility complex issues; tenascin-X-tied disorders including Ehlers-Danlos; and 17-hydroxysteroid-dehydrogenase-8 variance [which deactivates androgens+estrogens, and synthesizes moderate estradiol].

Or how so many genes near the adjacent corticotropin-releasing-hormone-receptor-1 (CRHR1) and Tau protein (MAPT), in the same area as DNA-repair-gene breast-cancer-associated1 (BRCA1), are spuriously tied to irrecoverable oxidative cell damage and neurodegeneration.)

C...Some very important pseudoautosomal genes include the final stage of melatonin synthesis (ASMT & ASMTL); antiviral and anti-small-pathogen signal receptors, for interleukin 9 and interleukin 3; SPRY3 lymphoid-to-myeloid switch granulocyte-macrophage colony stimulating factor (GM-CSF); cytokine-like-receptor 2 (CLRF); glycogenin 2 (starting-point for muscle fibers); steroid sulfatase (activates androgens, estrogens, progestogens); sex receptor Y and protocadherin-11-Y (PCDH11Y) in men [causing heritable father-to-daughter changes in protocadherin-11-X and near-adhacent androgen receptor].

D. Also, check out the research from the last head of the Kinsey Institute. They hired her for that vasopressin+oxytocin triggers pair-bonding, and monogamy in monogamous mammals.

e.g. "Oxytocin and Vasopressin Circuits in Context of Love and Fear", from the 'Vasopressin System in Behavior' edition of Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fendo.2017.0035...

"Opposite effects of oxytocin and vasopressin on the emotional expression of the fear response" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00796...

Dune's Fremen are stellar thought-experiments of vasopressin-driven folks who feel strong oxytocin boosts in their own homes/territory.

If you research something specific, it doesn't necessarily mean you're oblivious to other things. They might just be outside of the scope of your research.

Exactly. Problematic when "lurking variables" with strong correlated effects (like vasopressin activity in this study) are of scope.

If they had high levels of baseline vasopressin, shouldn't this make it easier to stay hydrated because it increase the amount of fluid reabsorbed by the kidneys?

Not if the high levels were an incomplete response to very low receptor performance.

Biochemical signaling pathways are a mixture of negative-feedback systems that do not assume anything about the sensitivities of each receptor (because in a pure feedback system the signal would be amplified until it activated the receptor sufficiently) and "level-interpreting" (I don't know the actual term) systems where each concentration communicates a specific semaphore-like claim and if the downstream receptor does not match the sender, it will get the message wrong. One simple case where the second phenomenon arises is when the production of the signalling compound is prevented, by the finite ability of the cell to make it, from rising to the levels that would agonize the downstream receptor enough to achieve whatever the cell was going for.

That makes sense.

I wonder if there is an evolutionary reason behind this, such that people who are less stressed (more altruistic or empathetic), have more resources (no need to work multiple jobs, not living paycheck to paycheck, not sleep deprived from multiple shifts, etc.) and this is a signal of reproductive fitness?

Maybe, but stress certainly increases their aggressive demands on others to prioritize empathy over all other considerations. Or maybe those are not real empathetic people, just ones claiming to be super empathetic for status?

I definitely know this about myself - especially after having kids.

Kids stress me out like none other and in those times I have to fight to even begin to think about other people.

And you can tell who crossed that bridge, never to come back. Georgia and Tennessee, for instance. I think I crossed over that one in 2019.

Of course it does. Hard to be altruistic when you're figuring out your own survival.

Anyone who says economics doesn't matter is wrong.

Interesting article, but this is the first time in a while I've found a menu to so aggressively get in my way.

Actual finding: People are less altruistic immediately following a stressful event.

Nothing in here indicates a causal cortisol->~altruism connection was discovered, nor did they attempt at hinting towards causality (e.g. via instrumental variable estimation). The described findings appear entirely consistent with stressful situations both increasing cortisol levels and decreasing altruism through an unrelated mechanism.

So I'm not sure I see the point of mentioning, let alone highlighting, a specific hormone rather than the causal variable they did study and discover, which is the stress itself.

Agreed.. giving a public speech must impact your brain in so many more ways than raising cortisol, or?

Very good point, too. No telling how relatively strong ly all the other stress-adjacent hormones fit into the picture. (adrenaline? Adrenocorticotropic hormone? Corticotropin releasing factor? Proopiomelanocortin?)

Is not that obvious?

Looks like Amazon's business plan leaked.

You need a study to confirm you don't give away food when you're starving?

Well, I have read stories of people doing just that. When communities are struggling, they often do help each other.

You can't generalize like that. If people are starving and one person found food, they'd try to share the food with the others instead of gulping it all down instantly.

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