Escaping Self-Sacrifice

Self-control and Sacrifice 1 Running Head: SELF-CONTROL AND SACRIFICE Low Self-control Promotes the Willingness to Sacrifice in Close Relationships

While previous theories and research suggest that human behavior is automatically driven by selfish impulses (e.g., vengeance rather than forgiveness), the present research tested the hypothesis that, in close relationships, people’s impulsive inclination is to be pro-social and to sacrifice for their partner—to pursue the partner’s or the relationship’s interest at some costs for the self. Fou...

Preemptive defensive self-sacrifice by ant workers.

Worker insects altruistically sacrifice their own reproduction to rear nondescendant kin. This sacrifice reaches its most spectacular level in suicidal colony defense. Suicidal defense, such as when the sting of a honeybee worker embeds in a predator and then breaks off, is normally a facultative response. Here we describe the first example of preemptive self-sacrifice in nest defense. In the B...

Self-sacrifice and self-destruction. A christian looks at suicide.

The Role of Self-Sacrifice in Moral Dilemmas

Centuries' worth of cultural stories suggest that self-sacrifice may be a cornerstone of our moral concepts, yet this notion is largely absent from recent theories in moral psychology. For instance, in the footbridge version of the well-known trolley car problem the only way to save five people from a runaway trolley is to push a single man on the tracks. It is explicitly specified that the bys...

Sinister Self-Sacrifice: The Contribution of Apoptosis to Malignancy

Induction of apoptosis is one of the main defenses of the body against cells that have acquired malicious mutations. It may seem counter-intuitive then, that massive cell death is observed in many malignant tumors (1, 2). Despite high rates of apoptosis, these tumors continue to grow rapidly. Thus, tumor cell growth must outbalance tumor cell death. Intuitively presumed only to inhibit tumor gr...