If our genes have told us once, they’ve told us a thousand times: stay out of harm’s way. When a madman’s raging, when a bomb goes off, when a 110-story building is pancaking down and another one right next to it is about to do the same, run the hell away.
Humans, instead, are guided by a sort of moral grammar—a primal ethical armature on which decency is built, just the way our language is built on syntax and tenses and conditional clauses. You know when a sentence is right and when it isn’t even if you can’t quite explain why, and you know the same thing about goodness too. Psychologist Michael Schulman of Columbia University likes to pose the thought experiment of the kindergarteners who are taught two rules: it’s not OK to eat in the classroom and it’s not OK to hit other children. Tell the kids that the teacher has lifted the no-eating rule and they’ll happily eat. Tell them that the teacher has lifted the no-hitting rule and they’ll uniformly balk. “They’ll say, ‘Teacher shouldn’t say that,’” says Schulman. “That starts at a very young age.”
What starts young stays with us. Yes, we’re savage; yes, we’re brutal. It was a member of the home-team species, a homo sapiens like anyone else, who set the Boston bombs, and like it or not, that person is very close kin to you. But you’re close kin to the first-responders too, you’re close kin to the people who cried for the eight year old who died, not even knowing the child’s gender or name, because an eight year old simply shouldn’t die, and surely not the way this one did.
Read more: http://science.time.com/2013/04/16/first-responders/#ixzz2QtRzDyZb
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