Abstract: The viewpoints and understanding of altruism by some foreign scholars are reviewed and discussed in this article. The development and contends of altruism were focused and summarized to provide the theoretical basis and the model for future studies. The relative altruism, reciprocal altruism, pure altruism and other altruism were discussed with the empirical description and the standard research analysis method, based on the correlation literature material. And the natural selection, the group selection, the gene choice, the kin selection, the reciprocal altruism, the selfish gene, the convict difficult position, and the pure altruism were also used to explain the phenomenon of altruism.