The 6 Most Uplifting Facts About the Human Race

Helping other people even when it doesn't help you is pretty much the definition of "good person," but that sort of behavior doesn't come naturally. We're born as greedy little milk-sucking sociopaths, with no thought to anything but our next hit of sweet, sweet MomBoob. All the good qualities in humans have to be taught and carefully nurtured.

Here's the reality: Selflessness is a drug, and the best people on Earth are hardcore addicts.

Medioimages/Photodisc/Photodisc/Getty Images
Above: the milk of human kindness.

Back in the mid-2000s, scientists from the National Institutes of Health embarked on an epic journey to figure out which part of the brain was responsible for generosity, hoping to find and eat enough of those brain parts to finally become the most generous, a Voltron of generosity (science rules). The study went how you'd expect: Subjects were hooked up to fMRIs and handed a list of charities. They then had to choose whether to donate or hoard their money and receive a reward at the end of the study.

Rather than creating some sort of uncontrollable Lawnmower Man of altruism, the experiment revealed a shocking secret: Donating to a charity lights up the same chunk of the brain that makes us crave food and sex. Generosity is "neurologically similar" to a line of cocaine. We're happy when we do good things, and that makes us want to keep doing good things. (Can you imagine how good those people would have felt if they'd donated cocaine to the charity of their faces?) The super nice guy who always bends over backward to make his friends happy is caught in the same feedback loop as the dude sucking dicks for blow behind the 7-Eleven.

Jupiterimages/Stockbyte/Getty Images
Jim seemed well-adjusted until his friends found him covered in vomit and wrapped around a Salvation Army donation bin.

Researchers have recently discovered just how deep this connection between science and morality goes. They primed one group of students with words like "microscope" and "fulcrum" to jump-start their brains in science mode, which is apparently a thing you can do. Next, they brought in detailed stories of date rape for the test subjects to read and quizzed them on their reactions. This revealed two critical things:

1. A shocking number of rape fantasies involve microscopes.

2. People primed with sciencey words had a stronger negative reaction to date rape.

Comstock/Stockbyte/Getty Images
"Thank you for teaching me right from wrong, microscope."

Does this mean ending the college rape epidemic is as simple as increasing the density of Bunsen burners? Probably. But scientists went ahead and conducted further tests, checking altruistic actions over the course of a month and giving subjects the opportunity to split an amount of real money with some anonymous person. Every test had the same conclusion: People thinking about science acted more morally.

So there you go: Science makes people less awful. If you want your kid to grow up right, buy him a biology textbook and a pint of mercury. He will, sure, get his ass kicked pretty hard for a while, but eventually he'll be a saint.

Creatas/Creatas/Getty Images
Or a mad scientist. It really depends on how much of that mercury he drinks.

I was totally out of line when I made that claim earlier, and I'd like to apologize to every baby in the audience. We tend to think of infants and toddlers as too young to really know much about right and wrong. It's the only time in life when utter, overwhelming selfishness is totally acceptable. We call them the "terrible twos" for a reason: Toddlers are complete bastards.

BananaStock/BananaStock/Getty Images
Look at those eyes, so full of wonder and unbridled cruelty.

Now, I've been saying for years that infant children need to be held accountable for their actions. More sentences to kid prison would cut down on our planet's "crying babies on airplanes" epidemic. And science agrees with me, kinda. Babies do know right from wrong. A study has found altruistic behavior in children as young as 18 months.

The test for this one was kind of genius. Experimenters would do something like drop a clothespin or fuck up at book stacking while children watched nearby. Once it was clear the experimenter had erred, almost every child would move to help. If it looked like the experimenter fucked up on purpose, though, the babies didn't act, because if you're going to dick around like that, they aren't about to waste their precious pooping and burping time to fix your goddamn messes.

James Woodson/Digital Vision/Getty Images
What, are they made of poops and burps? Yes, but still.

For a variety of confusing reasons, scientists carried out this same battery of experiments on a group of young captive-raised chimpanzees. The results were almost identical, suggesting that altruism has deep evolutionary roots ... and that science can be pretty adorable when it isn't giving lab rats syphilis.

Scientists at the University of Oxford figured out a way to create this exact situation. They called up hundreds of people and asked them to flip coins. Respondents were told that tails would earn them fat stacks of unrolled coke straws, while heads would win them fuck all. In a twist too shocking for network television, 55.6 percent of participants reported heads.

Clearly, honesty has virtues besides sorta rhyming with the word "policy." Researchers with the University of Notre Dame asked a bunch of subjects to spend 10 weeks trying their very hardest not to lie. A control group was, presumably, asked to go right on being a curse to all who knew and loved them. After 10 weeks, the no-lie group experienced "on average" four fewer mental health complaints and three fewer physical complaints.

Tom Le Goff/Digital Vision/Getty Images
Take it from me: All sick people are liars.

These studies make a lot of sense when you read them together: People don't like to lie because it makes them feel like shit. But there's an interesting exception to this rule -- the office. Another version of that coin-flipping study done in a laboratory found that 75 percent of participants claimed tails and a payday. We're much less likely to lie when we're in our homes, but our sense of self isn't as strong in less personal surroundings. So we say fuck it, and trade our ethics in for fancy green paper we can use to buy sandwiches.

But people who focus on stories of robberies in the wake of major disasters often ignore that this shit goes on when there aren't storms, too. There's also the argument that a lot of "looting" was done by starving people trying not to die. Looting purists often argue that this doesn't really count.

Yahoo
No speakers? Try again, ladies.

OK, so people don't steal as much shit as you'd think. At least not recreational shit. But that whole "society collapsing into anarchic violence" bit still seems plausible. Take away three hot meals and electricity, and the average person will shoot their own aunt with a crossbow inside of 48 hours. That's not cynicism, just pragmatism.

We tend to assume that order is a fragile thing held tenuously in line by legions of police officers and National Guardsmen. Wash those dudes away in flood waters or blow them up with a bomb, and we'll make "Helter Skelter" look like "Imagine." But these scientists interviewed survivors of real-life disasters and terrorist attacks and found something shocking:

Miguel Medina / AFP / Getty
"Both those things suck."

When a group of people are attacked, the shared threat gives them a common identity. Panic is extremely uncommon, and the majority of survivors tend to exhibit altruistic behavior. They look out for injured or elderly members of the group and help herd kids away from the danger. In any disaster you care to look at, good behavior is the norm, not the exception.

In the aftermath of World War II, otherwise known as "the best excuse people ever had to shoot at each other," Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall decided to interview some of his soldiers. He asked them about this whole murdering Nazis enterprise they'd been working on and found, to his shock, that only about 15 to 20 percent of soldiers in the line of fire had actually shot at the enemy. These men were actively engaged in combat, being attacked by Nazis, and most of them couldn't bring themselves to pull the trigger.

This was apparently the first time in history a general thought to ask his men if they'd actually followed through on the whole war fighting thing. And the answer was a resounding "fuck no." Marshall spread his study out to thousands of soldiers in 400 companies across every theater of battle, and the results were identical. People don't like shooting other people.

Keystone / Stringer / Hulton Archive / Getty
"We're not wild about getting shot, either."

In 1986, the British military decided to take this study one step further. They looked into the "killing effectiveness" of units from more than a hundred battles across two centuries and compared that data to hit rates from simulated laser tag versions of those battles, because some British soldiers apparently had the best job in the history of both war and science. They found that kill rates from the simulated battles were vastly higher than the real ones. Conclusion: This whole "not wanting to kill people" thing isn't a new phenomenon.

Robert Nickelsberg / Getty
And also, laser tag is awesome.

Here's the bad news (or if you consider the above paragraphs bad news, here's the good news): Modern militaries have successfully nipped most of this pacifist nonsense in the bud. You can't make people want to shoot the shit out of other random people, but you can make them rehearse the process so much that it becomes automatic.

So there you go: People are inherently peaceful. Ish.

Always on the go but can't get enough of Cracked? We have an Android app and iOS reader for you to pick from so you never miss another article.

Are you a fan of money, everlasting glory, but really just money? We want to give you that! (Particularly the money part.) Enter as many designs as you want into our T-shirt contest and you might just win $500.