The secret reasons we give to charity
Posted on January 20th, 2010
Have you given money to Haiti yet? If you haven’t, why not? And perhaps a more puzzling question: If you have given money in the wake of this month’s devastating earthquake — the death toll of which may climb into the hundreds of thousands — what exactly motivated you to do that?
The last question may seem dumb or even callous. You gave, it’s obvious, because you’re an altruistic person, you have compassion for the victims and it’s the moral thing to do.
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But, in truth, donating to charity is a wholly irrational act, economically speaking. It doesn’t benefit you, and in fact it leaves you poorer by precisely the amount you donate (save tax deductions). Whatever is behind the impulse to give to charity, it’s not obvious.
As economists and social scientists have begun in recent decades to study people’s true motives for giving to charity, what they’ve found hasn’t exactly been in keeping with the flattering way we humans like to see ourselves.
While altruism may play its part, there are also many other factors at play when we donate: guilt, the desire to boost our social status, the need to feel good about ourselves, even our sex drives. Any attempt to understand why we give — or to get us to give more — must deal with this dirty and tangled reality.
The first thing to understand about our charitable impulses is that they’re one of the least-rational facets of our economic being. Not only is giving away money for no obvious benefit irrational, but the way we give money is extremely strange — and that strangeness is where we can glean insight into our true motives.
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The bigger the problem, the less we give
Take, for instance, the issue of magnitude. The bigger the problem, generally, the more money is needed to solve it. Yet the more overwhelming a problem is, the more abstract it is, the more our brains shut down.
University of Oregon psychology professor Paul Slovic, a pioneer in charity research, looked at this problem recently in a clever experiment. Taking people who had just participated in a paid psychology study, he gave them the chance to donate up to $5 of their earnings to the charity Save the Children. When one group was shown a picture of a malnourished 7-year-old African girl named Rokia, it donated generously. But when a different group was shown the picture and informed about the larger problem of millions of children in need, it donated roughly half as much as the picture-only group.
“What really moves people is making an emotional connection,” Slovic said. “The numbers not only don’t convey feeling, they actually get in the way of feeling.”
While what’s been called “psychic numbing” can have beneficial effects, it also gets in the way of people watching from abroad reacting compassionately. (The term was coined to describe how rescue workers turned off their emotions to deal with the horrific aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing, and relief workers are presumably operating off of the same thing in Haiti today.)
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By necessity, our well of compassion is far from bottomless. The current view is that altruism, to the extent it exists in any pure form in humans, is an evolutionary adaptation to bind families and small communities. As ancient as these preferences might be, our contemporary giving habits seem to reflect little change.
Roughly 80% of Americans’ giving, according to the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, is focused on local communities and churches. In 2004, according to a report by the center, international aid received just 1% of household giving. Tsunami relief got 2% of the pie that year.
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