Opinion

It’s always for a good cause: When integrity takes a back seat to altruism

Barbara Oakley Professor, Oakland University
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Love him or hate him, President Obama has been raised to believe precisely what many of us have been raised to believe: that altruism — caring for others — is fundamentally one of the most sacred activities of life.

We tend to think of altruism as a commonly-shared, benignly beneficial concept — that most people’s thoughts about how to help others are the same across the country and the world. But different versions are common; some think altruism can only take place by actively helping others — actually giving a person money or food, for example. Others have a more Zen-like sense that active giving can sometimes serve as a powerful disincentive.

We are also shaped in various subtle ways by our training and abilities. If our specialty is social work, for example, then we know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that more access to social workers would be a powerful way to help others.  If, on the other hand, we’ve succeeded in business by working not only harder, but smarter, then we can feel certain that others could be most successful by following in our path.

There should be some methodology that would allow us to discern the more truly beneficial approaches for helping others.

What about, say, science?

Here’s the rub. We’re beginning to discover gaping flaws in the scientific process — failings that go hand in hand with the growing importance that people are placing on science. More retractions are taking place, more cases of fraud, and sometimes flagrantly bizarre methodologies and findings, particularly related to helping others, that remain unquestioned and broadly cited for years.

How can that be?

Science helps highlight altruism’s insidious, corrosive influence. When altruism rather than integrity gains ever more importance in people’s minds, it becomes easier to corrupt almost anything — even the scientific process itself. After all, researchers can always justify what they doing as being for a good cause, even if that good cause is simply getting a paper published so that they can get tenure and have a lifetime of good pay to help support their families.

One spectacular study by Stanford University’s John Ioannidis has revealed that more than half of all published research findings are false, often because of researchers’ biases in setting up their research to reveal what they wanted to find. Another major study found that 88 percent of 53 “landmark” cancer studies could not be replicated. The gold standard conclusions, in other words, were not only patently false, but they have also led entire industries down a hobgoblin path of misspent billions. Those who hold up science for its integrity should know that that integrity has lost its gloss. Altruism, that creeping, insidiously helpful and often narcissistically self-serving activity, has turned gold standard studies to fool’s gold.

Altruism can indeed be a very good thing. But altruism, especially when it comes to helping those we care most about, has also served as a foundation for some of humanity’s most horrific actions. Turn in your Jewish shopkeeper to do a good deed for your purebred Nazi brethren? It’s only natural. Take a machete to those horrible Tutsis who are threatening the livelihood of your fellow Hutus? Of course. Murder millions of hard working farmers because you want to take their land for the State, which will benefit everyone? Certainly — after all, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. From suicide bombing to the purges and genocide of millions, altruism has proved itself the sharpest of double-edged swords.

We can’t help but wonder what President Obama was thinking when he denied his videotaped “you can keep it” promises, and his continuing stream of misstatements and falsehoods. Nowadays, in a society where caring is king, we see how common it is for government projections to be “unexpectedly” lower than anticipated. We watch as reporters feel it their duty to support causes rather than pursue facts. We observe how even sworn oaths by government officials before Congress have become meaningless, and the world’s trust in the United States evaporates.

How can these things occur in an increasingly scientific, ostensibly rationally-based society?

Simple.

It’s always for a good cause.

When integrity takes a back seat to altruism, all things become possible.

Barbara Oakley, a professor of engineering at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, is the lead editor of Pathological Altruism, (Oxford University Press, 2012), and the author of a recent groundbreaking paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: “Concepts and implications of altruism bias and pathological altruism.”