Supposedly, altruism is concern for the well-being of others. The word “altruism” has only been around less than 2 centuries, starting at the time of the French revolution, and since then it has expanded to include consideration for other sentient things, like animals, but even plants for some. In it’s idealistic state, altruism is when an individual performs an action at personal cost, pleasure, quality of life, time, probability of survival or reproduction, that benefits, directly or indirectly, another individual, without the expectation of reciprocity or compensation for that action. In practice, it goes further than that: it makes charity a moral obligation, even morphing into making it mandatory in collectivist cultures.

However, the Theory of Psychological Egoism suggests that no act of sharing, helping or sacrificing is actually altruistic because the person receives an intrinsic reward in the form of personal gratification, and this is obviously true. People are driven by positive feedback, a dose of one of the neurotransmitters in the brain, usually dopamine, but there are others. Only the most basic of emotions are triggers, and altruism, the supposed motivation behind charity, isn't one of them. Then why do people get positive feedback from altruism? Actually, people do charity work for masochistic reasons, or as a desperate substitute for lack of achievements in their own life. There's also the sense of superiority that doing charity work brings which triggers the hormones. Altruism isn’t real, neurotransmitters are.