Science

Why are we so uncharitable to those doing good deeds?


In 2014, the word “humblebrag” was added to the Oxford online dictionary, along with the following definition: “An ostensibly modest or self-deprecating statement whose actual purpose is to draw attention to something of which one is proud.”

In the wild, humblebrags often present as false complaints (“I’ve lost so much weight I have nothing to wear!” or “So stressed: I applied for six jobs and got all of them!”) or as a boast cloaked in humility (“I can’t believe my book became a bestseller!”).

Another kind of humblebrag is the one where we tell people what a wonderful person we are, without coming right out and saying it. For example, take a look at the following (genuine) tweet: “I just did something very selfless. But more importantly it was genuine and I know it means a lot to the person in the long run. #SoWorthIt.”

If such a statement prompts a wry smirk, you’re not alone. Brazenly announcing one’s virtue typically invites scepticism rather than adulation. Even children as young as eight years old take such self-serving claims with a pinch of salt, attaching a higher moral value to individuals who perform good deeds in private rather than bragging about them in public. Experiments with adults find that the perception of someone’s generosity is downgraded when they broadcast their good deeds on websites such as Facebook. Oscar Wilde put it best with his assertion that the “nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously – and have somebody find out”.

There is an unscientific explanation for all of this, but which nevertheless makes it easy to understand: humans are intuitive bullshit detectors. We don’t take actions at face value. Instead, we attempt to look under the bonnet to ascribe thoughts, emotions, beliefs and desires to the person performing the behaviour. The ability to manage our own reputation is built upon our unique potential to see the world from another person’s perspective and to ask how they might update their beliefs about you in light of the behaviour they observe (or hear about from others). And we use these same cognitive skills to try to understand why other people behave as they do.

Evidence that this relies on fairly sophisticated socio-cognitive abilities comes from studies of infants and toddlers. Children are not born with the ability to make inferences about the mental states of other individuals or to feel embarrassment or shame about their actions. Instead, the ability to take the perspective of another individual is something that emerges during development. Before the age of five (or thereabouts), children don’t really know or care what other people think of them and don’t attempt to curate their own reputation at all. It is only when they are around eight years old that children start to understand fully how their actions make them look and to interpret other people’s prosocial behaviour in terms of self-serving motives.

Because we understand that good deeds can heap benefits on to the beneficent individual, we try to infer whether these acts were performed in pursuit of these benefits to their reputation or prestige (in which case we frequently withhold them). Because co-operators can take the moral high ground, they are sometimes treated with antipathy, even when the motives underlying their actions are not in question. For instance, consider the relentless ridicule, derogation and even sarcastic death threats that vegans get from meat-eaters. Despite the well-known joke – question: how do you know if someone is a vegan? Answer: don’t worry: they’ll tell you – it is highly unlikely that vegans opt for this diet on the basis of reputation concerns. Reducing meat consumption is morally worthy not just because it reduces animal suffering but also because cutting meat out of the diet is thought to be the single biggest lifestyle change that can help to reduce personal carbon emissions. Why do people enjoy denigrating vegans when we should really be applauding them?

Vegans might take heart in the knowledge that “do-gooder derogation” can also be elicited in highly abstract laboratory scenarios, regardless of what people do or don’t eat. For instance, in a public goods game, where people could cooperate by contributing their money to a collective pot or defect by keeping their money for themselves, group members frequently reported disliking the person who contributed the most to the collective pot, adding that they would like to kick them out of the group if possible. When asked to explain this resentment, people said things such as “No one else is doing what he does. He makes us all look bad” and “This would be OK if someone else in the group was being like this, but no one is so it’s wrong”.

When given the chance, some people take things one step further by paying to punish the most cooperative members of their group. This “antisocial punishment” was originally dismissed as an experimental anomaly, but is routinely observed (to varying degrees) in these kinds of experimental settings all around the world and is thought to be a tool that punishers use to elevate their own rank in the game, relative to others.

With this in mind, things such as anonymous giving start to make more sense: a donation that far outshines that of everybody else on a fundraising page might draw the wrong kind of attention. In 2014, I ran a study using donations to online fundraising pages, where I found that the tendency to give anonymously was not distributed evenly among all of the donors. Instead, as you might expect, people were more likely to donate anonymously when they were making very small donations but also when they were making excessively large donations, relative to what others had already given on that page. The desire to avoid being perceived as a braggart can also deter people from telling others that they’ve donated to charity, even though posting these donations to social media is known to generate an influx of donations from that donor’s social network. Back in 2010, the fundraising platform JustGiving had worked out that every Facebook “like” on a fundraising page shared to the platform was worth about £5 in additional donations. Inspired by these stats, the team tried to nudge donors into sharing their friend’s fundraising page on Facebook immediately after they had donated. But people seemed to find sharing their beneficence cringeworthy and were reluctant to pat themselves on the back in such a public forum.

The London marathon
Fundraising organisations found the most effective message to get people to publicise donations on social media is: ‘Help your friend raise even more money by sharing their page!’ Photograph: NurPhoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images

To try to encourage donors to share their donations on social media, the JustGiving team ran an experiment where they manipulated the message they showed to the donors. One of the least effective prompts was one inviting the donor to publicly congratulate themselves: “You’re an amazing person. Share your donation!”

“Think your friends might care about this too?” was similarly fruitless. The one that worked best? “Help your friend raise even more money by sharing their page!”

This message works because it gives people the permission to advertise their good deed, while maintaining their own sense that they are doing it for the right reasons: to help a friend rather than to show off. This simple change in wording increased the tendency to share to Facebook by 28%, leading to an estimated £3m increase in charitable donations over a single year.

So, virtuous behaviour is not a magic bullet to gaining prestige and status benefits. People frequently try to infer the motives underpinning good deeds and excessively generous acts can be perceived as competitive rather than altruistic. This “tainted altruism” effect can produce some highly suboptimal outcomes, particularly for people or companies that work in the for-profit, for-good sector. Take Pallotta TeamWorks, a fundraising company that described itself as being motivated by “asking people to do the most they can do instead of the least”. Established in 1982 by Dan Pallotta, the company pioneered an innovative approach to raising money for charitable causes. Rather than allowing fundraisers to raise any amount they could, Pallotta challenged people to complete multi-day events, such as the Breast Cancer three-day walk, and to commit to raising four-figure sums in doing so. Over the course of nine years, the approach netted a staggering $305m for the charities involved. However, there was a major PR problem: Pallotta TeamWorks was a for-profit company, not a charitable organisation itself. In 2002, as news of Pallotta’s six-figure salary and the sums of money the company was making started to emerge, the public outcry forced the charities to sever links with Pallotta TeamWorks and the company folded. Ironically, the charities also suffered vastly reduced revenues as a consequence. JustGiving has encountered similar ire from the public for being for-profit, despite helping charities to raise hundreds of millions of pounds for good causes.

This is not intended to be a defence of companies such as Pallotta TeamWorks or JustGiving. I use these examples to illustrate how quirks of our psychology can prompt a form of moral hypocrisy. We say we like people who do good things, but then we make fun of them or try to exclude them from the group. We say we think it is good to raise money for charity or protect the environment, but we rail against companies that try to achieve these aims if they also derive a profit in doing so. Our difficulty in reconciling the fact that something can be both for profit and for good at the same time frequently prompts us to choose outcomes or people or companies that deliver no benefit whatsoever to good causes, rather than those that take a slice of the benefits they generate. The knowledge that our gut reactions to these kinds of scenarios can sometimes lead to objectively worse outcomes might prompt us to pause and evaluate our reactions to good deeds, before reflexively damning the morally superior individuals and organisations that benefit from investing in prosocial ventures.

Bill and Melinda Gates have pledged to give away most of their wealth in their lifetimes.
Bill and Melinda Gates have pledged to give away most of their wealth in their lifetimes. Photograph: Reuters

Our ambivalence towards largesse is especially pronounced when it comes to the very wealthiest members of society – the Richard Bransons, Warren Buffetts and Bill and Melinda Gateses of the world. There is no denying that these individuals are generous: all have signed up to the Giving Pledge, promising to give most of their wealth away during their lifetimes (indeed, Buffett and the Gates co-founded the initiative) – and they are often admired for their altruism.

But the motives underlying billionaire philanthropy are increasingly subject to scrutiny. For instance, multimillion-dollar donations are tinged with mistrust when individuals lobby against policies that would force them to redistribute their wealth through taxes instead.

The Sackler family, which has funded some of the world’s most famous arts institutions and museums, has struggled to burnish its reputation through these lavish gestures because the wealth used to do so is seen as having been purchased at great societal cost.

What it often seems to boil down to is authenticity. Part of the reason we pay attention to prosocial gestures is because they tell us something about the person or organisation that is performing them. Good deeds act as signals of an underlying prosocial disposition and a commitment to helping others, rather than exploiting them for your own gain. Those who send these signals without exhibiting these traits – that talk the talk without walking the walk – are the most likely to be judged negatively for their actions. In fact, one recent study found that individuals who loudly and visibly profess their morality are often held to higher standards – and judged more negatively for any personal failings – than those who simply keep their heads down.

Folk wisdom has long held that no good deed goes unpunished. Our scientific understanding is now finally beginning to explain why.

  • This is an extract from The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World by Nichola Raihani, which is published by Jonathan Cape on 3 June (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply



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