Science shows why some people risk their lives for others

As a teenager, Abigail Marsh was driving along a freeway when a dog darted across her path. She swerved to avoid it, sending her car spinning into oncoming traffic. The engine stalled. The car came to rest in the fast lane. In that suspended moment, she was certain she was about to die.

Then a stranger appeared at her window.

“In this incredibly warm, reassuring voice that I will never forget,” she later told the BBC, “he said, ‘You look like you could use some help.’” He climbed into the driver’s seat, steered the car to safety, checked she was all right — and then disappeared. “I never got his name,” Marsh said. “I never said thank you.”

That brief, anonymous act set the course of her life. Today, Marsh is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Georgetown University, where she studies altruism — particularly people who help strangers at real risk to themselves, without expecting recognition or reward.

Over years of research, she has asked such people a simple question: why?

The answers are rarely eloquent. Many altruists struggle to explain themselves at all. Helping, they say, felt obvious. “This person was going to die, and I felt like I had the ability to help them, and so I did,” is a common response. There is no sense of heroism in their telling — just action.

Marsh’s work suggests that altruistic people tend to be more sensitive to others’ distress. They notice fear more quickly. But she is careful to stress that this does not make them a moral elite. Altruism, she believes, can be learned. Like exercise, it grows through repetition. Small acts of kindness train attention outward. Over time, responding to need begins to feel less like a choice and more like a reflex.

This understanding sits easily alongside an older moral wisdom the Church has long upheld: virtue is formed before it is tested. We do not summon courage in a crisis; we draw on the habits we have already cultivated. Love practiced in ordinary moments shapes how we respond when the stakes suddenly rise.

That helps explain why some people run toward danger without stopping to calculate the cost.

It helps explain, too, what happened recently off the coast of Western Australia that we recently shared.

When 13-year-old Austin Appelbee and his family were swept out to sea, he swam four kilometers through open water to get help, unsure whether his mother and siblings were still alive. Partway through the swim, he made the perilous decision to remove his life jacket because it was slowing him down. For hours, what sustained him was prayer, Christian songs, and what he called “happy thoughts” — memories of family, friends, and even Thomas the Tank Engine.

“I don’t think it was me who did it,” Austin later said. “It was God the whole time.”

Seen through the lens of Marsh’s research, his courage looks less like a sudden miracle and more like a heart already trained to respond. He did not set out to be heroic. He simply could not imagine doing nothing. His attention was fixed on others. Faith gave him strength in the moment, but the movement toward self-gift was already there.

That may be the quiet truth beneath many acts of extraordinary courage. People who step into danger are not necessarily braver than the rest of us. They have often practiced noticing. Practiced responding. Practiced generosity when the cost was small.

And when the moment comes — whether on a freeway, or in open sea — they move.

Not because they are extraordinary, but because love has already shaped their instincts.