However, to conclude this before analyzing the matter in more depth would be premature. Suppose, as a thought experiment, that I could press a button and no longer experience pleasure when I help others. This may seem like an undesirable option - why would I want to deprive myself of a source of pleasure? However, in doing so, I would also be depriving myself of a source of displeasure: the guilt and empathic pain I experience when I don't help someone who needs my help. If I pressed this button, I could go about my business, achieving my own goals (leaving aside the question of what goals would be valuable if I did not care about others) without being pulled by the emotional drive to help others. I may not choose to press this button, but I will not rule out the possibility that I or someone in my shoes would.

Of course, this button does not exist literally, but does it exist metaphorically? That is, can I choose to shut off the system that drives me to act altruistically? The answer to this question depends on the fundamental cause of altruism. If it is a social construct, a product of social norms, then it may be destructible. To a large extent, humans are norm-following beings [REF?], but this fact applies to humans neither universally nor deterministically. For example, Oliner and Oliner (1988), who interviewed members the relatively small proportion of non-Jewish Germans who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, found that while approximately 90% of the rescuers did so simply because they were following the altruistic norms their parents had instilled in them as children, approximately 10% of the rescuers did so because they it concorded with their own moral principles, which they derived independently of the norms of both society at large and their parents. It is not clear what the source of this independence is, but it is clear that it is possible for people - or at least some people - to resist social norms as the cognitive and emotional mediators of their actions. If altruism is, in fact, entirely a social construct, it is at least possible that a person could, through independent thought and probably only with much time and effort, decide to reject it and obtain no emotional value, ceteris paribus, from behaving altruistically. However, if the source of altruistic behavior is, to a large extent, hard-wired and genetically determined, then a person's attempt to eradicate the emotional value of altruism would be mostly futile.