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Greedy corporate executives, greedy athletes, and greedy politicians have loomed large in popular culture and the national news over the past few months. But the apparently natural human instinct to be selfish has been over-emphasized for too long, according to UCLA professor Shelley Taylor in her new book.

In “The Tending Instinct: How Nurturing Is Essential to Who We Are and How We Live,” Taylor argues there is a distinct, evolved human tendency to nurture, befriend and protect one another, especially during a common hardship.

Taylor uses the increasingly popular field of evolutionary psychology in her research. According to this field of study, human behavior today can be studied in terms of an adaptation to the hardships of early, precivilized humans, an era which lasted for thousands of years and formed human instincts.

One of the most heated arguments in the field today deals with the causes of human altruism – why humans help one another rather than act selfishly. It is widely accepted, especially among evolutionary psychologists, that helping close relatives also serves an important selfish purpose: passing on the family genes. But what is less clear is the reason why humans help or nurture non-relatives.

In her research, Taylor found that for adults, nurturing social groups, even beyond the immediate family, are an evolutionary adaptation that can lessen the negative effects of stress.

By measuring stress levels through questionnaires, levels of “stress chemicals” like epinephrine and norepinephrine, heart rate and blood pressure, Taylor found that people do not always try to protect their own personal interests during difficult times.

Taylor demonstrated that women more commonly “tend and befriend” to cope with stress, meaning they band together and build groups of allies and friends to protect each other and especially their children.

Taylor discovered that men, when facing hardship, often build hierarchies to channel their testosterone-fueled aggression into a constructive attempt to protect the group.

“The tending and befriending behavior is more common in women, but men have other ways of tending that benefit the social group just as much,” Taylor said.

Today, many people live without the support of such a strong social group around them.

“People who have friends are healthier than people who are isolated. The culture we live in now doesn’t recognize the importance of social ties to physical health,” Taylor said.

The idea is that there are cumulative adverse effects to constant exposure to stress, such as cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, and some lapses in immune functioning, Taylor said.

But beyond just mediating stress in adults, Taylor also explains that nurturing care during early childhood is crucial for children to be healthy later in life.

“There are big cultural differences in what ways children are nurtured, but common to all is physical contact of all kinds,” she said.

Recently, another study published in the Psychological Bulletin, authored by UCLA professors Rena Repetti and Teresa Seeman along with Shelley Taylor, also predicted a similar link between early emotional care and physical health.

Titled “Risky families: Family social environments and the mental and physical health of offspring,” the paper is a review of more than 500 studies that together demonstrate that a lack of nurturing and tending early in life leads to grave physical and psychological health risks in adulthood.

Both the paper and “The Tending Instinct” agree, for children, risky families are those which replace nurturing care with coldness, aggression, lack of emotional support and frequent conflicts.

Repetti said, “What we found is that children from risky families are more likely to suffer later in life from heart disease, diabetes, obesity, hypertension and even early death.”

These health risks for non-nurtured babies are similar to those found in solitary, stressed-out adults.

The “Risky families” study claims the human need for nurturing is so essential to healthy development that the lack of it has contributed to a two to threefold increase in suicide and homicide among children over the past 30 years.

To illustrate the psychological importance of nurturing in “The Tending Instinct,” Taylor describes the crowded orphanages of old Communist Romania. Abandoned children there were not usually physically abused, but instead were emotionally neglected. Once they were released, many of these neglected children could not understand criticism or praise or adapt to any social group that tried to adopt them.

For Taylor, much of this tending behavior, which is crucial for both healthy children and adults, is based on natural instincts, not reason.

She studied “heroes” who risked their lives to save others from danger or provided long term care for sick family members. Taylor concluded that very few of them actually reasoned through their decision to help, thought about what they were doing at the time, or considered themselves to be heroes afterward. They often simply acted without thinking.

Through various interviews, Taylor found that heroes, both men and women, are reluctant to see themselves as special because they feel others would do the same thing.

“I think that a lot of altruistic behavior is in the genes. It’s not as much a mystery as we think,” she said.

Taylor admits in “The Tending Instinct” certain sciences of behavior, especially economics, directly contradict her conclusions.

Various other theories about altruism have also been prominent over the past few decades. Most of them used evolutionary psychology to emphasize aggressive, individualistic motivations for human action.

But in response Taylor coolly maintains, “Altruism is only a puzzle to be explained if you start with the assumption that people are selfishly aggressive.”