Stephen Post is Professor of Preventive Medicine and Bioethics and Director of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics at Stony Brook University in New York. His many articles and books on altruism include, as co-editor, Altruism and Altruistic Love: Science, Philosophy, and Religion in Dialogue (Oxford University Press, 2002).

Keishin Inaba, associate professor of human sciences at Osaka University in Japan, has a website on altruism. He is author of Altruism in New Religious Movements: The Jesus Army and the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order in Britain, which examines whether Christianity and Buddhism change people’s attitudes and behavior towards altruism. He also edited The Practice of […]

Psychology professor Richard Ebstein at National University of Singapore was senior author of the altruism gene study, which showed that the dopamine gene plays a role in prosocial behavior. The study was published in Molecular Psychiatry in January 2005.

Read a seminal article by Allan Luks in the October 1988 Psychology Today that describes the “helper’s high” – a sense of calm and enhanced self-worth – observed in a study of more than 1,700 women involved regularly in helping others. Altruism functions like exercise but has some advantages over it, Luks suggests.

Read a 2003 Boston Globe article on studies linking altruism to better health and stress reduction.

Read an October 2004 Science & Theology News article on evolutionary theory and altruism.

Dr. Laila Al-Marayati is a physician and past president of the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Muslim Women’s League, which represents Muslim women and supports the status of women as equal members of society. The league has a speakers bureau and position papers on topic issues such as divorce, honor killing, female genital mutilation, gender equality, inheritance and […]

The Muslim Observer is an online publication created in Detroit. Aslam Abdullah is editor.