Luberheroes like Spider-Man achieve phenomenal and international success. This attraction for the archetype of the hero, as explained by the psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875-1961), was perhaps transmitted during the evolution because of the interest of altruistic behaviors for the survival of the human being. ‘species. Without mutual aid, it is difficult to build cities or fight against ferocious animals.
This preservation may also have been enabled by the association between altruism and the brain reward circuitry. Thus, in 2010, Kathryn Buchanan and Anat Bardi, from the University of Kent (United Kingdom), were able to show how “doing good makes us feel good”. Yet, it is unfortunately a well-known fact, not all adults are altruistic. Do we know what goes on in the brain of a hero, that is to say that of a person who decides to help others despite the cost or the danger that this represents for themselves?
In 2011, the team of Grit Heine, from the University of Zurich (Switzerland), tried to measure to what extent a subject could feel the pain of another and how this could be linked to his desire to help this person. . They used a measure of our emotions, skin electrical conductance (or electrodermal response). This measure is nothing but the principle of the lie detector. When we are moved, we sweat and this changes the way our skin conducts electrical impulses. The measurement of cutaneous electrical conductance is therefore an indicator of our emotions (more than of our lies).
Virtual building on fire
In the first part of the experiment, the researchers recorded this measurement while participants received painful stimulation or while they watched other people suffer. In a second part, the participants could choose to suffer themselves in order to avoid this suffering for other people.
The results are formal: the most altruistic subjects in the second part of the experiment, who preferred to suffer instead of other people, are those who, in the first part of the experiment, had the same electrodermal response when they suffered themselves and when they watched others suffer. In other words, genuinely feeling the suffering of others predisposes to altruistic behaviors even when these are costly for oneself.
A few years later, in 2014, Marco Zanon, from the University of Trieste (Italy), and his colleagues set out to understand what was going on in the brains of heroes in a situation where danger was simulated. mortal. These authors placed the participants in a virtual building on fire and, without informing them, the subjects found themselves in a situation in which they had to save their life, selfishly, or stop and help a virtual person trapped in the flames, at the risk putting themselves in danger.
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