The prosocial nature of human beings

The prosocial nature of human beings refers to the view that people are by disposition ready to help, share and cooperate – and that selfishness and violence are not the core of the human being but are largely learned. Research in recent years supports this: purely self-interested behaviour is the exception in experiments, and help is the normal case in everyday life. At the Kyborg Institute this good core is at the same time a fundamental conviction – and an assumption one can start from.

“You have no enemies, only disturbances in your subconscious … Realise your plans without hurting others.” – Horus, channelled message of 1 January 1999

What does “prosocial” mean?

Prosocial describes any behaviour that benefits others: helping, sharing, comforting, cooperating. The term is broader than altruism, which additionally requires a selfless motive. Someone who acts prosocially may also gain something themselves – joy, standing, a dependable community. That does not diminish the act.

The question of human nature is an old one. An influential assumption holds that human beings are at bottom self-interested and need coercion in order to live peacefully – as in Thomas Hobbes, in Thomas Henry Huxley, or in economics’ model of the human being who always maximises gain. In his specialist book Ausgewählte Perspektiven des Altruismus (Selected Perspectives on Altruism, 2017), Tobias O. R. Alke evaluated more than 650 works from sociology, philosophy, anthropology, psychology and economics. His result: this assumption does not stand up to the research.

Are human beings selfish by nature?

According to the current state of knowledge, no. Three findings from large studies:

• Honesty: In 355 cities in 40 countries, more than 17,000 “lost” wallets were handed in. Wallets with more money were returned more often – something neither laypeople nor experts had expected (Cohn et al. 2019).
• Help in conflicts: Video recordings of 219 public disputes in three countries show that in nine out of ten cases someone intervened, and the more people were present, the likelier this was (Philpot et al. 2020). The famous counter-case – the “38 witnesses” in the Kitty Genovese case – is today regarded by researchers as a parable; more on this under Helping Behaviour (Bierhoff).
• Social preferences: A behavioural model covering many game situations finds no purely self-interested type. Most people give weight to the well-being of others – to differing degrees, but consistently (Bruhin, Fehr & Schunk 2019).

This matches observations of great apes that Frans de Waal has been describing for decades: comforting, sharing and reconciling have deep roots among our relatives.

Do even small children help?

Yes. Children of about 14 to 18 months help spontaneously when an adult cannot reach something – without a reward (Warneken & Tomasello 2006). At 15 months, toddlers already expect a fair distribution (Schmidt & Sommerville 2011). Michael Tomasello interprets this as follows: the readiness to help appears of its own accord from around the first birthday – it is not instilled, and rewards can even weaken it. Only afterwards do children learn whom to help and whom not to (see Shared intentionality (Tomasello)).

Not every early finding has held. That even infants prefer “helpers” to “hinderers” was not confirmed by a large replication study in 37 laboratories (Lucca et al. 2025). What is well documented, by contrast, is what happens afterwards: children in eight very different societies align their sharing more and more closely with the norms of their surroundings as they grow older (House et al. 2020). What is laid down, then, is the readiness to cooperate and a receptiveness to rules – how much someone gives, and to whom, is shaped by culture.

Are small children selfish?

No – they are not yet finished. Compassion is there early; sharing and fairness are learned step by step. A two-year-old who will not give up his spade is at a stage of development, not displaying a selfish core.

• Compassion from the third month. Even infants show concern when someone is in distress, and those who feel with others early help more often later (Davidov et al. 2021).
• Selective from the age of three. Three-year-olds are less likely to help someone who wanted to harm another (Vaish, Carpenter & Tomasello 2010), and they return kindness more generously when it was shown intentionally (Vaish, Hepach & Tomasello 2018). Children thus pay attention to intention early on.
• Sharing grows with age. Three- to four-year-olds tend to share in their own favour, seven- to eight-year-olds mostly equally (Fehr, Bernhard & Rockenbach 2008).
• Adolescence is important, but not the only phase. It is regarded as a sensitive period for social learning (Blakemore & Mills 2014) – yet children between eight and eleven are actually the most receptive to encouragement towards helpful behaviour (Foulkes et al. 2018). And in adulthood, helpfulness continues to grow (see below).

In 2017 Tobias O. R. Alke still assumed that young children are rather selfish and become more helpful with age. Re-examination shows: the direction across the whole of life is right, but the evidence for a selfish beginning does not hold – the new edition notes this. In his own earlier works the order is reversed: “Thus at birth we are, in this classical sense, highly altruistic beings” – and “only through its egoism does the child, in later phases of life, gain the possibility of developing its own personal identity”. Self-assertion is, in this view, a step towards becoming one’s own person, not the opposite of goodness. That this imprinting already begins before birth is his conjecture – compatible with the early findings, but not yet specifically tested.

D. Harald Alke describes the same development from the practice of upbringing: “As soon as a child has said ‘Me!’ for the first time, there is really no telling it anything any more.” For him this is not selfishness but the awakening of the child’s own will. And how children learn, the Kyborg Lexicon says in one sentence: “This is the path every child takes quite naturally: play, trial and experience.”

Does giving make people happy?

People who spend money on others feel somewhat better than people who spend it on themselves – in rich and poor countries alike (Aknin et al. 2013), among toddlers and in a remote village on Vanuatu (Aknin et al. 2015). A careful replication study confirmed the effect but found it small (Aknin et al. 2020).

D. Harald Alke describes the same thing from practice, in both directions: whoever gives becomes happier – and whoever takes joy in themselves finds it easier to give. In his model of stages, selfless helping is not a duty but an unfolding, preceded by one’s own joy (see Self-care).

Where do selfishness and aggression come from?

At the Kyborg Institute we see the main cause in imprinting. D. Harald Alke worked out a developmental model for this that begins as early as pregnancy: the mother’s stress, imitation, punishment, enforced submission, existential fear. “Most misbehaviour happens through imitation,” says the Kyborg Lexicon, and of a snappish person: “For the most part that is not really them. The human being is good at the core.” Whoever can no longer give out of fear for their existence loses something of their humanity – which is why consciousness of lack has such far-reaching consequences. Tobias O. R. Alke summed it up in 2016: the supposedly evil nature of the human being is a product of an unbalanced upbringing, not of innate nature.

Research adds disposition to this picture. Twin studies attribute about half of the differences in antisocial behaviour to heritable differences (summarised in Tielbeek et al. 2017), and disposition and experience often work together. The sound version therefore reads: disposition is unevenly distributed between individual people, and the environment has a say too. This does not contradict the basic idea – it concerns the human being as a species, not the differences between individuals. And it fits a principle we hold: people are of equal worth, but not the same. Differences in disposition and maturity are not a ranking of the person.

More on this: Egoism · Aggression · Responsibility.

Is helpfulness innate?

In part. Genes, brain and instinct play a part – but they do not decide. Biology and imprinting belong together.

• Heritable, but not fixed. In seven-year-old twins, differences in helpfulness could to a large extent be traced back to heritable differences (Knafo-Noam et al. 2015). Behind this, however, stand a great many gene variants, each with a tiny effect (Chabris et al. 2015) – there is no “altruism gene”. Heritability describes differences within a population; it changes with age and says nothing about an individual person.
• The brain rewards giving. An analysis of 36 brain studies shows: giving reliably activates networks that also respond to reward (Cutler & Campbell-Meiklejohn 2019).
• It is not the cool head that decides. Whether people decide quickly from the gut or at leisure does not, on average, change their generosity – the result of 22 studies with more than 12,000 participants (Fromell, Nosenzo & Owens 2020). Intelligence is linked above all to recognising the long-term advantages of reciprocity (Proto, Rustichini & Sofianos 2019). Differences in ability are not a ranking of people.
• What is learned is not inherited through the genes. That parents pass on acquired behaviour through their genetic material has so far not been demonstrated in human beings (Horsthemke 2018). What parents pass on, they pass on through example, relationship and upbringing.

In 2017 Tobias O. R. Alke argued for taking biology more seriously in research on altruism and reproached sociology for resisting it. For that time, this reluctance is documented; since then, the connection of genetics and social research has become a field of work in its own right within sociology. Where the work read its evidence too far – for instance on oxytocin or on the inheritance of learned behaviour – the new edition notes it. The basic idea remains: the human being is also biologically disposed towards cooperation.

D. Harald Alke sets an accent of his own. For him, inconsiderate behaviour is not a lack of intellect but often precisely its product: “Such one-sided, destructive ways of acting are typical of the intellect, which thinks everything through step by step without grasping the larger connections.” And he does not see ignorance as a disposition: “Stupidity and fear result from not knowing. Strictly speaking, it is always a not wanting to know. For being able to know is always possible if one strives for it.”

Is fear innate?

What is innate is the readiness for fear – as protection. What a person fears, and how strongly, is to a large extent learned, including through merely observing others (Debiec & Olsson 2017). The distinction matters: the work on altruism is not directed against protective fear, but against an instilled, generalised fear of one’s fellow human beings. An argument from Tobias O. R. Alke’s studies of 2016: if there were an innate “natural state of fear”, people everywhere would have to react in the same way – and they do not.

More on this: Fear (in German).

Do people become more helpful with age?

On average, yes. Older adults act more altruistically than younger ones (Sparrow et al. 2021), and data from 67 countries confirm this – but also show a stronger preference for one’s own group (Cutler et al. 2021). The prosocial nature thus has an edge: cooperation inwards can go hand in hand with drawing boundaries outwards. That is why it includes the conscious decision to remain open towards strangers as well (see Collectivism & individualism and Reciprocity).

Do women and men help differently?

In amount hardly, in kind yes. A meta-analysis of fifty years of research on social dilemmas finds no difference overall in cooperation (Balliet et al. 2011). Women and men help to a similar extent but, on average, set different priorities: women more often comfort, care and offer support in close relationships; men more often rescue, defend and stand by strangers in brief, often risky situations (Eagly 2009). In games about sharing money, women give strangers a little more on average, whereas men give more to family and friends (Doñate-Buendía et al. 2022). That women describe themselves as more empathetic is well documented; in measurements of the reaction itself the differences are small (Baez et al. 2017).

Everyday life shows the same picture. Daughters take on more of the care of elderly parents – daughters more for mothers, sons more for fathers (Grigoryeva 2017); men receive more care from their wives than the other way round (Glauber 2017). Women and men in the EU volunteer almost equally often – formally 18.2 and 19.6 per cent, while women help informally a little more often (23.3 compared with 21.7 per cent; Eurostat, EU-SILC 2015).

As early as 2017, Tobias O. R. Alke came to the conclusion that it cannot be claimed that men are generally more selfish than women – they set different priorities towards relatives and strangers. Research since 2013 supports this. According to the current state of knowledge, the differences do not stem from upbringing alone: role and disposition work together, and roles explain a great deal. How strongly they are shaped is described by D. Harald Alke with an example: “Sayings such as ‘men don’t cry’ or ‘girls are too stupid to do sums’, by the way, also cause engrams – less through acute pain than through frequent repetition.” And he does not assign the centre of loving-kindness to one sex: “All parents need it in order to raise a child in a positive way.”

All these findings are averages with a large overlap. They say nothing about an individual woman or an individual man – and nothing about which sex would be the “better” one.

Is there an altruistic personality?

Yes – but differently than is often thought. Someone who does a great deal for others is usually not the agitated, driven rescuer, but a person with inner calm and clear values. And they are most likely to help when the situation speaks to them, for example through a request. Person and situation work together.

What research shows:

• Values that belong to one’s self-image. People for whom moral qualities are important to their self-image act prosocially somewhat more often on average (across 111 studies; Hertz & Krettenauer 2016). People who hid Jews during the Second World War differed from uninvolved contemporaries above all in a strong sense of social responsibility, in compassion and in courage (Fagin-Jones & Midlarsky 2007).
• Calm instead of agitation. People who help strangers at high cost – for instance as living donors for an unknown person or in a rescue under danger – respond to another’s distress with less stress of their own, yet perceive the fear of others more precisely. They are most clearly characterised by honesty and modesty (Rhoads et al. 2023).
• Confidence instead of self-presentation. Helping is linked to the conviction that one is able to help and to empathise (Caprara, Alessandri & Eisenberg 2012). A self-image concerned with effect, by contrast, tends to lead to help in front of an audience (Konrath, Ho & Zarins 2016). Those who help lastingly are those who do so of their own accord – which does helpers and recipients equal good (Weinstein & Ryan 2010).
• Person and situation. A direct request for help awakens the readiness that is already there (Varese & Yaish 2005). Those who stand firmly in their values help even when it does not pay; where orientation is weaker, costs and opportunities are more likely to decide (Kroneberg 2012).
• A whole life long. The readiness to help shows itself early, remains fairly stable into adulthood (Eisenberg et al. 2002) and continues to increase with age (see above).

In 2017 Tobias O. R. Alke described the altruistic personality through several traits: ideals, a sober assessment of one’s own ability to help, personal initiative, independence from the judgement of others and a development that extends over the whole of life; in addition, the classical virtues that the sociologist Vincent Jeffries assigns to it – temperance, fortitude, justice, charity and prudence. The core stands up to re-examination. Where the work read its sources too far, the new edition notes it – for instance, that by “self-awareness” (Selbst-Bewusstsein) what is meant is the perception of one’s own inner life, not outward self-assurance.

D. Harald Alke arrives at the same picture from practice: “So if I am inwardly stable, I can give my fellow human beings a great deal of what they themselves need: my time and attention for those who have no time, something of my calm and confidence, and a little more joy in life.” And briefly: “Self-confidence (Selbstbewußtsein) really means being conscious of oneself (selbst bewußt sein)!” He sees the helper as an example, not as a rescuer: “We should rather show by our own lives that things can go well.” His rule for helping has two sides: “There is practically no sense in wanting to rescue or help someone who does not actively ask for it himself.” – “That would be just as wrong as refusing a desired, necessary act of help!” And where the need is immediate: “If a person falls right at your feet, try to help him, but be careful in doing so as well.”

Someone who is unsure of themselves is therefore not a worse person. Inner security can be developed – in the view of both authors, insecurity is instilled rather than part of a person’s nature (see Imprinting, Self-care and Responsibility).

Which feelings make people helpful?

Feelings have a say – not alone, but throughout. They shape what we perceive, how we weigh things up and whether we act (Lerner et al. 2015). Yet not every feeling works in the same way:

• Gratitude and awe open us up. People who are grateful act markedly more prosocially; across 91 studies the correlation is r = 0.37 (Ma, Tunney & Ferguson 2017). Awe, too – for instance in the face of nature – made people more generous and more helpful in experiments (Piff et al. 2015).
• Guilt steers one-sidedly. Feelings of guilt urge us to make amends – often in favour of the person to whom we owe something, and at the expense of others involved (de Hooge et al. 2011). Even shame can have a constructive effect when a mistake can be put right (Leach & Cidam 2015).
• Compassion fades with large numbers. Concern drops as soon as there is a second person in need (Västfjäll et al. 2014); the more victims, the less help – above all because people feel they cannot make a difference (Butts et al. 2019). What helps against this is concrete help whose effect can be seen.

In 2017 Tobias O. R. Alke described emotions as one of the most important factors for lasting helpfulness and classed guilt as a poor motivation for a community. He calls on sociology to include the biology of feelings instead of regarding action as if it had no body.

D. Harald Alke puts it from experience: “It has always been the way of things that we first make a decision emotionally, which we then try to justify rationally”. For him, feelings are bodily and learned at the same time: “Our feelings are instilled reactions to environmental conditions within a certain framework that the biology of our body prescribes for us.” And he describes the downside of the daily reports of horror: “We hardly react any more when real threats are reported.”

A word of caution belongs here: simple hormone explanations – such as “oxytocin makes people trusting” – have proved not very robust in replication studies (Nave, Camerer & McCullough 2015). Feelings are body and imprinting; no single substance explains why a person helps.

How do children learn to be helpful?

Above all through what they experience – less through what they are told. Children learn through role models and through explanation; coercion and punishment tend to bring about the opposite. Research confirms this direction, with smaller effects than is often assumed:

• A warm upbringing that explains. An upbringing with warmth, reasons and clear boundaries is associated with more helpfulness, an authoritarian one with less – across cultures (Wong, Konishi & Kong 2021). Physical punishment goes hand in hand not with better but with less favourable behaviour (Gershoff & Grogan-Kaylor 2016). And it works in both directions: helpful children in turn improve the relationship with their parents (Pastorelli et al. 2016).
• Mother and father alike. The influence of mothers’ and fathers’ upbringing is about equally great (van der Storm et al. 2022).
• Role models and peers. Those who experience helpful role models later help markedly more often; across 88 studies this is a medium-sized effect (Jung et al. 2020). In adolescence, peers play a part.
• How parents argue, not which family form. What matters for children is how parents handle conflicts – whether they live together or apart is less decisive (Harold & Sellers 2018).
• Engagement of one’s own free will. Community service in adolescence leaves its mark when it is talked and thought about (van Goethem et al. 2014) – and later volunteering follows above all when the early engagement was voluntary (Kim & Morgül 2017).

In 2017 Tobias O. R. Alke described parents as a formative influence and socialisation as a lifelong process. The direction stands up to re-examination; some things the work read too far, for instance that parents alone decide. The new edition notes this. As early as 2009 he wrote that it is better to instruct a child who misbehaves than to exclude it, and in 2016: the evil nature of the human being is “a product of our unbalanced upbringing, not of our innate nature!”

D. Harald Alke knows the mechanism from practice: enforced obedience “can … easily turn into a blatant egoism”. He describes what parents give without any ranking between mother and father: “Being a mother or a father means being able to give away something of one’s own values without knowing whether one will get anything back.” And he draws a line that belongs to maturity: whoever looks for the causes of their problems in their parents forgoes the chance to take their own life into their hands. Imprinting is not destiny.

What does the Kyborg Institute say about this?

In D. Harald Alke, the basic thesis appears explicitly as an assumption one can start from – not as a dogma:

“Let us assume that the human being, nature and everything that lives in it is good and right from its origin.” – D. Harald Alke, 1986

He sets it against another assumption that confirms itself: “It is a fundamental error of most people that they think they can only succeed against the interests of others or at the expense of others. Whoever thinks like that is, of course, proved right!” And briefly: “One need not be a wolf to others.”

The distinction between innate ethics and instilled morality belongs to this: conscience arises from both. Community that carries us grows from this inner attitude, not from decree (see Community that strengthens us and Loving-kindness & altruism).

What do the channelled messages say?

In the mediumistic messages that D. Harald Alke has recorded since 1990, the same fundamental conviction appears as a communication from the spiritual world. We present them as a personal, worldview-based perspective, not as evidence (see Channelling):

“In the beginning was God, and all was good. Now we are, and everything will become as we long for it in our hearts. Let the goodness of the heart be the measure for life on earth.” – Horus

“Believe in the good in human beings and you will recognise the divine spark in their consciousness.” – Junow, 3 July 1991

“The power of love rests in every human being. You should not think little of it, but express it more and more.” – Horus, 15 September 1997

“Evil does not exist. It is a diminution of the good.” – Horus and other beings of light, 2 May 1994

The last thought has a long history: in Christian philosophy since Augustine it is called privatio boni, evil as a lack of good. There is also a message on fear that fits the research: “Fear is a natural protective mechanism” (Junow, 1 July 1991). And the message of 1 January 1999 that heads this entry shows where the attitude leads: not to a struggle against others, but to realising one’s own plans without hurting others.

Where are the limits of this view?

The findings are clear, but they are not a final word. Several laboratory findings that long counted as evidence have not been confirmed in large replication studies; what has grown, by contrast, is the body of field and large-scale data. Heritability describes differences between individuals and says nothing about the worth of a person or a group. And every scientific explanation is a model – a map, not the landscape. At the Kyborg Institute the good core of the human being therefore remains both: a well-supported finding and an attitude one can choose.

Further reading: The Good in the Human Being in Friedrich Nietzsche · The Emotional Foundation of the Child.

Related terms

• Altruism – selfless action for the good of others
• Loving-kindness & altruism – the attitude as lived
• Egoism – the opposite term
• Empathy – compassion as a compass
• Imprinting – how instilled patterns arise
• Fear (in German) and Aggression – protection and overlay
• Ethics and Morality – innate and instilled
• Reciprocity – giving and taking
• Collectivism & individualism – community without coercion
• Consciousness of lack – when the fear of scarcity blocks giving
• Channelling – on the origin of the messages

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By Tobias O. R. Alke, D. Harald Alke