Psychologist Alison Gopnik explores new discoveries in the science of human nature.
New research shows that the older we are, the more altruistic we become.
Like many people in their 60s, I feel that I’m less driven and ambitious than I used to be. I find myself thinking more about helping my students and children and grandchildren. But do we really get more generous and altruistic as we get older? Two new studies suggest that we do and that this change in our motivations runs deep.
Earlier studies had already provided some evidence that this might be true, finding that older people donate more money to charity both in real life and in hypothetical experiments and, like me, say that they care more about others. But what if older people just tend to have more money and resources than younger ones, or they don’t value money as much, so they find it easier to give it away? Or do they just want to appear more generous to the researchers?
Julia Spaniol at Toronto’s Ryerson University and her colleagues tried to answer these questions earlier this year by combining 16 different studies with more than 1,000 participants in a “meta-analysis” in the journal Psychology and Ageing. They analysed whether the size of the altruism effect depended on how rich or well-educated you were, whether the researchers looked at your actual behaviour or what you reported about yourself, and whether the researchers knew who you were or you answered questions anonymously. None of it made any difference—the older people were just as altruistic in all the studies.
There seems to be something about getting older that just intrinsically makes us more generous.
Patricia Lockwood at the University of Birmingham and colleagues designed a very clever new experiment, published in the journal Psychological Science in April, to ask the same question. Instead of asking people how they felt, or getting them to donate money, the researchers got them to squeeze a “dynamometer,” a machine that measures the strength of your grip. Participants could choose whether to put in effort and squeeze harder to get more points. The points translated into a small monetary reward. In half the trials, the reward would go to the participants themselves; in the other half they would go to another person. There were 150 trials, so people had a lot of chances to decide whether to go for the easier or harder choice, and they had to make the decisions quickly and intuitively, without thinking about it much.
Researchers tested one group aged 18-35 and another aged 55-85. Everybody rested sometimes and put in effort at other times. But the younger people put in much more effort when they got the reward themselves than when it went to the other person. The older people still worked to get the rewards themselves, but they were much more likely to put in the effort to help the other person than the younger folk were.
There seems to be something about getting older that just intrinsically makes us more generous. This may fit with another rather surprising discovery, which is that we also seem to get happier as we grow older, despite our increasingly creaky minds and bodies. A variety of studies across many different cultures and countries suggest this; for example, in several studies, when people were randomly “pinged” during the day and asked to report their emotions, older people were more likely to report positive feelings.
There is something to be said for the drive and ambition and egocentrism of youth; we may need those motivations to make our way in the world. Still, when someone asked Sophocles how he felt about losing his sex drive as he got older, he said it was like being released from the grip of a raging madman. Maybe the real raging madman who consumes our youth is that overpowering, preoccupying self. Age releases us from that grip and lets us appreciate just how valuable other people are.
