How Aging Might Encourage Altruism
Older adults tend to be more generous with their money and their time, but why?
"Young people today are so selfish!" It's a common sentiment that might sound harsh. But there is truth behind it: In a 2024 review of literature on altruism, researchers found that compared with younger people, older individuals displayed more prosocial behavior — actions that helped others.
While it would be easy to write off young people as hopelessly self-absorbed, there's more to the story. Researchers have found that as we age, our brains respond differently to altruistic behavior. And these changes in our brains could be making us more likely to focus on others' well-being.
From an evolutionary perspective, prosocial behavior has been key to humanity's survival. "It should be baked into our DNA to be at the very least cooperative," says Jane Piliavin, professor emerita of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies altruism and helping behavior.
Why We Help
But why do we decide to help — or not — in any given situation? Usually our choice is not a reflection of the kind of person we are, says Piliavin. "It's much more the circumstances and your assessment of the likelihood of success and the likelihood of damage to you," she says.
We tend to perform a quick evaluation: "If I help, is it going to hurt me? If I help, can I be of any use? Is there some way I can help without doing it myself?" Piliavin says.
Illustrating this point, Piliavin co-authored a 1969 study on how bystanders responded to different people collapsing on the subway. The researchers designed two situations: In one, the collapsing person pretended to be drunk; in another, the person held a cane. The study also tested bystander responses to both a Black and white victim.
The intoxicated person rarely received assistance, Piliavin says. That was likely because bystanders worried about the risks of engaging with someone who appeared volatile. "If the drunk did get help, it was essentially always someone of the same race as the victim," Piliavin says.
By contrast, the man with the cane received help almost immediately — after about five seconds on average, says Piliavin. Because the victim was clearly disabled, bystanders didn't think long before acting.
No matter our age, we're wired to help one another. But why do older adults tend to be more concerned with others' well-being, from donating money to volunteering?
As with the subway study, circumstances can play a role. Older individuals may have more disposable income or a desire to leave a positive legacy. But Piliavin chalks it up to something more mundane: If you're older and retired, you no longer have to spend several hours per day working. You might do more for others simply because "you have more time," she says.
The Impact of Aging
Could this increased prosocial behavior also have something to do with how our brains react to helping others? To answer this question, researchers first needed to determine what a genuine altruistic response would look like in the brain, says Ulrich Mayr, a University of Oregon neuroscientist who co-authored the 2024 review of research on prosocial behavior.
Our brains contain "a large network of areas that all sort of move in the same direction when something positive happens," says Mayr. "We often call them the reward areas." In a 2007 study in Science, Mayr and other researchers used MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) to see how people's reward areas responded when money from an unspecified source was donated either to a charity or to the participants themselves.
Importantly, because participants were passively watching the charitable transaction, there was nothing in it for them — they received neither social accolades nor the "warm glow" of making a gift with their own money. Yet, most participants' brains showed at least some favorable response to the charitable donation. Researchers concluded those people were displaying genuine or pure altruism.
Why Does This Happen?
In a similarly designed 2016 study of adults aged 18 through 67, Mayr and co-authors discovered that this pure altruistic response increased steadily with age. More research is needed, Mayr says, both to determine why the response strengthens and to establish whether the trend continues at even older ages. "There is some indication that as people grow older, beyond 70, things might turn around again," he says.
New challenges, from health problems to dwindling financial resources, could shift people's focus away from others and back to their own well-being.
As for the perception that young adults are selfish, the reality is more nuanced. "Young adults do have a different task in life," Mayr says. They're mainly concerned about building financial stability and raising a family. And relative to older people, their brains derive fewer rewards from altruistic behavior.
Encouraging Altruism
Across the lifespan, we can nurture our altruistic response simply by performing good deeds, from volunteering to helping a neighbor. Even if our reasons aren't completely selfless — for instance, leading a community fundraiser in hopes that people will respect and admire us — altruistic acts enable us to experience the rewards of helping others.
Ultimately, the behavior can "become sort of a self-propelling mechanism," says Mayr. We may find that these acts spark a genuine desire to keep doing good deeds, provided we allow ourselves time to reflect on the experience. "There needs to be enough space for the true altruistic motive to blossom," says Mayr.
