WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST NOW:

Last year, one of us, Professor Rand, together with his colleague Ziv Epstein, conducted an analysis of recipients of the Carnegie Medal for heroism, which is awarded to those who risk their lives for others. After collecting interviews given by 51 recipients and evaluating the transcripts, we found that the heroes overwhelming described their actions as fast and intuitive, and virtually never as carefully reasoned.

This was true even in cases where the heroes had sufficient time to stop and think. Christine Marty, a college student who rescued a 69-year-old woman trapped in a car during a flash flood, said she was grateful that she didn't take the time to reflect: "I'm thankful I was able to act and not think about it." We found almost no examples of heroes whose first impulse was for self-preservation but who overcame that impulse with a conscious, rational decision to help.

It is striking that our brute instincts, rather than our celebrated higher cognitive faculties, are what lead to such moral acts. But why would anyone ever develop such potentially fatal instincts?

It's been 32 years now, but the man whose particular burden it was to have found Joe Delaney, to have given him CPR, and to have still been holding Delaney's wallet and driver's license as the NFL standout was rushed to the hospital that afternoon always understood why people never seemed to forget Delaney's story: "There's been famous people that have died before, OK?" said police diver Marvin Dearman a decade ago. "But how many famous people have given their life trying to save somebody they didn't even know?" [...]

There at the south end of Chennault Park in Monroe, Louisiana, in the shade of a tree along the bank, sat Joe Delaney, 24-year-old running back for the Kansas City Chiefs, just two days away from moving with his wife and three daughters back up to Missouri for his third NFL season. He heard cries for help and, still wearing his flip-flops, he handed his wallet to the woman next to him, ran into the water ... and disappeared. Later, at the scene, Dearman would see those flip-flops, floating on the surface. He would find Joe Delaney's body in just six feet of water. "You know," Dearman would say, "we've often wondered how he drowned." One of Joe's sisters would say back then that an autopsy had shown that Joe had broken his ankle.

Twenty years after the tragedy, following a young adulthood fraught with trouble, LeMarkits Holland could still remember when his mother told him that Harry had died: "I just started crying, because I didn't want that to happen to my brother. Because he was kind of like the good kid and I was like the bad kid." LeMarkits, however, had survived: pulled out of the water, he would remember, by someone ... someone he thought might have been Joe Delaney. "I was under the water, and I was drowning," he'd recall. "Whoever saved me, they must have just threw me back on the shallow part, and tried to save somebody else." That tale would attach itself to the story of Delaney's heroic act, giving the darkest of days a small shaft of sunlight, becoming a kind of rural legend. But efforts to verify it would fall short.

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