onlooker wrote:Sea, yes that is a definite pattern. However, their are exceptions to this. For example many of us have heard of how soldiers risk and even forfeit their lives for the sake of fellow soldiers. These situation bring out the best and worse in us.
That is the difference between loyalty to tribe/family verses competition between yourself and any random other for necessary resources.
When military, or police or fire fighters risk injury or death for a comrade it is because the survival of the tribe is much more important than their own ego. Same effect when a tribal group member stays behind to delay the advancing threat so that other tribe members have a greater chance of escape/survival.
However if the individual observes a large percentage of the tribe/unit getting killed the idea that their sacrifice increases the odds of the tribe surviving pivots around to every remaining member of the tribe including themselves being extremely valuable to the survival of the tribe. As more and more members are removed the focus narrows down to personal survival is the only thing that will matter.
This is what took place in those shipwreck stories cited earlier in the thread, first the ship was lost, then more and more of the survivors were lost until it no longer became a situation of 'unit' survival as the largest number possible, but a matter of the individual must survive for anything else to have meaning.
The psychology behind it has been studied because of famous cases like the Donner party or that team of athletes who were marooned in the mountains after their plane crashed, or even how the Titanic survivors in the lifeboats reacted when the ship sank and over 1,000 people were left in the water screaming for rescue. Of the 20 lifeboats on the Titanic 1 was capsized and had a score of survivors clinging to the overturned hull but 19 others were only partly filled. Only 1 turned back to rescue the freezing people in the water. Nobody in the 18 lifeboats that could have turned back but which did not was punished in any legal way. By law and custom the 'lifeboat Captain' on each was responsible only for those lives of the people in their particular boat, because all countries with seafaring traditions understood back then that swamping a boat with too many people would lead to everyone dying instead of more people surviving. If every lifeboat had been filled to capacity and launched in an orderly manner at least 600 more people could have survived the sinking of the Titanic. In total the boats could have held a nameplate capacity of 1,178 adults men. Given the number of children and persons of small stature they could have held a mixed population of 1,200 to 1,400 but they only saved 706.