Delayed Response Altruism

A recently released study emerged with some interesting findings regarding how people behave in a disaster, using a comparison of people's actions in the Titanic and Lusitania sinkings. Most everybody is familiar with the sinking of the Titanic, made famous by that lame pose that Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslett made famous at the bow of the ship and that grating and that overplayed Celine Dion song. Its less famous counterpart, the Lusitania, sank when hit by a German torpedo in World War I, killing 1195 of those aboard.

What the study revealed is very divergent patterns of who survived, despite similar mortality rates. The Titanic saw an orderly evacuation where women and children were given priority to board the limited number of lifeboats, at the expense of men who gallantly embraced death (with the exception of that weasel, Cal, who later killed himself after the Stock Market crash... but I digress). In the Lusitania sinking, men pretty much made a beeline for the lifeboats and left the women and children for dead. Why the difference?

The study outlines a number of different reason for this contrast, the most prominent one being time. Benno Torgler of Queensland University of Technology, one of the leaders of the study, cites that the relatively short sinking time of the Lusitania (18 minutes compared to 2 hours, 40 minutes for the Titanic) left only the "survival instinct" for those young men on the Lusitania, without the luxury of time to consider rationally the consequences, merit and honor of their actions. In short, they simply responded to their rawest inclination. Or put another way, if they had time to consider the consequences, merit and honor of their actions - perhaps thinking long and hard about what their legacy would be and how such actions would be assessed in history - they might choose a different path.

This got me thinking about the condition of the human heart. I tend to think that the study is on to something when it notes that the absence of time, in some ways, reveals true intent, or the true heart of a person. There's little time to scheme or plan, and one just does what is most natural to the soul.

But I don't think that all people will instinctually act in "self-interest" when a snap decision is made - why then does a mother, with no time to react, throw herself in front of a car to save her child? Or even if one would argue that such an action is "self-interested" because it involves the propagation of one's genes, how about stories of self-sacrifice for the good of non-family members? Why does a soldier dive on a grenade to save members of his platoon? Clearly, there is something about certain people that provides some capacity to make remarkable decisions of altruism, even without the luxury of time.

Perhaps this is something that is "nurture" versus "nature" - the instinct to love sacrificially as opposed to acting in self-interest. For the Christian, this is part of the process of sanctification, and when observed in oneself or in another, it's a great thing to see.