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A few months later, Carnegie, then the richest man in the world, established a $5 million trust and the Hero Fund Commission. Of all the charitable organizations he started, the Hero Fund was his favorite. “I don’t believe there’s a nobler fund in the world,” he once said with characteristic immodesty. “It is the fund that may be considered my pet.” Most of Carnegie’s other philanthropies were someone else’s idea. But Carnegie dreamed up the Hero Fund himself. For all his ruthlessness as a businessman, he had a soft spot for civility. He disdained football as a sport for savages, so he donated a lake to Princeton University to give athletes another outlet. He was a pacifist and railed against the traditional definition of heroes as warriors. “The false heroes of barbarous man are those who can only boast of the destruction of their fellows,” he wrote. “The true heroes of civilization are those alone who save or greatly serve them.”

The Hero Fund offers an unusual database of documented heroes. (The Commission does not award medals without thoroughly investigating each case to confirm the facts.) And the list of recipients is diverse. “They come from every conceivable occupation, every age group, every ethnic background,” says Douglas Chambers, director of external affairs for the Commission. “I think our youngest was a seven-year-old girl. Our oldest was an eighty-six-year-old woman.”

But some similarities do emerge. Of the 450 acts of heroism recognized by the Commission from 1989 to 1993, a whopping 91 percent were performed by males, according to a study by psychologist Ronald Johnson at the University of Hawaii. Of course, that could just be a bias of the sample. The Hero Fund is hardly comprehensive. The Commission learns about most of its heroes through media outlets, so perhaps the kinds of heroics that men perform are more likely to get coverage. Or maybe men are just more likely to be in high-risk situations where someone needs to be rescued. (After all, 61 percent of the victims who got rescued were also male.) Due to their occupations as well as their higher tolerance for risk, men are more likely to be caught in perilous situations. And men are stronger, on average, which could influence their willingness to walk into danger.

But the gender breakdown might also suggest something more nuanced. Men are probably far more likely to see themselves as rescuers—to believe they are not only capable of heroics but that such behavior is expected of them. A disproportionate number of Carnegie Heroes were also working-class men, like Olian. Of the 283 men who rescued someone other than a member of their family, only two had high-status jobs. Once again, it’s possible that most of these men were doing what they thought was expected of them, given their roles in society. They tended to be truck drivers, laborers, welders, or factory workers—physical jobs that required taking some risk, just like rescuing.

A surprising number of the rescues occurred in rural or small-town America, the study found. About 80 percent of the heroic acts happened in places with populations less than one hundred thousand. Again, that could be a bias of the sample. But it’s also true that in small towns, people tend to know one another. And, following the theory of reciprocal altruism, acts of kindness are recognized and remembered.

Samuel Oliner, the Holocaust survivor who has devoted his life to understanding heroism, has analyzed the Carnegie Heroes as well. He chose 214 of them at random and interviewed them about why they did what they did. As with the World War II rescuers, he found a range of explanations. But a full 78 percent cited the moral values and norms they had learned from their parents and the wider community. “Many talked about how they had been taught at some point in their lives that people are supposed to care for one another and felt that being a helper is intimately connected with their own sense of who they are,” Oliner wrote. Roger Olian, the man who jumped