The Paradox of Giving

From Leon Neyfakh of The Boston Globe:

Every holiday season in America, as Thanksgiving fades and turkey sandwiches give way to Christmas trees and candy canes, Americans unleash an immense flow of charitable donations. For charities, it’s the busiest time of the year: Salvation Army bell ringers man their corners; workplace pledge drives abound.
The urge to give that is awakened around this time is an important one: Philanthropy plays a crucial role in American society, providing funding for a vast array of services. . . . 

Though the tradition of giving to the less fortunate has existed for millennia — and though researchers have long been interested in what makes humans want to help others at their own expense — social scientists have only begun to seriously examine the act of donating money in the past 20 years. 

The insights they’ve drawn have been helpful to fundraisers, enabling them to craft better campaigns and tug at our heartstrings with greater precision. But for those of us just looking to donate, and donate well, the emerging research on charitable giving has yielded a difficult truth: Thinking harder about how to give makes us less likely to give at all. 

This finding is concerning in light of the strong recent push to give more rationally — for even small individual donors to scrutinize the inner workings of charities and make sure their money is being spent productively. Research by economists and psychologists suggests that the impulse to give does not square with thinking in such a calculating way. On the contrary, it appears that giving is driven by emotional motives, rooted in deep impulses, cognitive biases and even our own selfish needs. (Charity research isn’t necessarily flattering to donors.) And when we think too analytically about giving, we can deflate our initial generous instinct. . . . 

One dominant strain of thought among charity researchers is that our donations aren’t chiefly driven by concern for others, or a principled sense of altruism — that instead, it’s largely a way for us to indulge the desire to feel virtuous and happy about our role in the world. This theory was formalized in 1989 by behavioral economist James Andreoni, who described the rush of self-satisfaction and sense of purpose one experiences after committing support to a worthy cause as a “warm glow.” The reason we give money, Andreoni wrote, is that it makes us feel good — regardless of how much it benefits the people we’re ostensibly trying to help. 

Another prominent theory to emerge from the research is that people give because of social pressure. We want to avoid appearing selfish or coldhearted, especially in front of people who are suffering or people whose opinions we care about. We might feel this type of pressure when we find ourselves passing a homeless person on the street, or when someone at the office asks if we’d like to participate in the companywide campaign for United Way. 

Those aren’t the reasons we like to think of ourselves as donating, but experimental research on charity tends to support the notion that donating and thinking occupy separate realms. . . . 

For humans, who distinguish themselves from beasts in part through their analytical powers, this is a troubling conflict. Why should thinking be the enemy of generosity? What does it mean that as soon as we enter the “deliberative mind-set,” to use Small’s term, we become less altruistic towards our fellow man?
One reason analytical thinking might have this effect on the charitable impulse is that, once people really think through what the charity they’ve selected might accomplish with their money, they start realizing just how little their contribution is going to help. This is sometimes referred to as the “drop in the bucket” effect. . . . 

Lise Vesterlund, an economist at the University of Pittsburgh, doesn’t share the dominant view of charity as being motivated primarily by people’s desire to attain prestige and feel good about themselves. Instead, she argues that existing research points to something she calls “the temptation to do good.” As she sees it, people are preprogrammed to help those who are suffering, and when we make an impulsive decision to give money to charities that don’t necessarily make the best use of it, we’re essentially indulging that temptation the way we’d indulge a sugar craving. 

But appetites can be healthy, too, and Vesterlund’s solution is to be sure we indulge them the right way: essentially, putting carrots closer at hand than a chocolate bar. If you know that donating money to a food bank this holiday season is going to go further toward helping the poor than giving the same amount in quarters to panhandlers, then decide that’s how you’ll do it when the appetite strikes. 

“We all know this time of year we’re getting tons of solicitations,” Vesterlund said. “If before going into the season you say, ‘I want to make substantial charitable donations, and these are the organizations I want to give to,’ you don’t fall prey to the temptations.”