David DeSteno, a psychology professor at Northeastern University, blogged here earlier this week about his research on moral hypocrisy. This is his last of three posts on the subject.
On Wednesday, I ended by suggesting that humans might just be good at heart. Sappy, I know, but nonetheless true (well, at least partially). For a long time, emotions have taken the rap for much of the dark side of human nature — violence, prejudice, greed. Yes, there is evidence to support each of these (some even from my lab).
However, just because emotions sometimes lead to undesirable behaviors does not mean that they must always be controlled for virtuous behavior to emerge.
A principal function of emotions is to provide an ongoing assessment of one’s environs and to constrain subsequent behaviors to increase adaptive responding. To use the classic example, the state that we call fear increases the likelihood of subsequent responses meant to avoid danger.
For humans, though, problems of predation or contracting communicable diseases may be no more important to flourishing than ones integrally involved in successfully navigating social life. Simply put, building social and economic capital is central to our success and depends on correctly dealing with questions like: “Who should I trust?” “Should I pay you back?”
Consequently, humans should possess a class of emotional responses that prod them to be “good partners.” As my collaborator Robert Frank has argued, many of these social emotions should help us control our greedy “id-like” impulses.
Now, the idea of such “moral sentiments” has been kicking around at least since Adam Smith, but supportive data has been hard to come by, at least until recently.
Consider the following experiment conducted by Monica Bartlett and myself. We brought people into the lab and set up 2 situations: One in which they confronted a problem which would require them to complete an onerous task and one where they didn’t face any problem. In the first case, a confederate, at some cost to herself in terms of time and effort, helped the participant solve the problem, which led to measurable feelings of gratitude. In the second, the confederate was just another person in the session.
After leaving the lab, all participants just happened to encounter someone asking for help on a different onerous task. This person was either the known confederate (labeled benefactor in the figure) or someone who was a complete stranger.
Looking at the first two bars, you can see that grateful participants helped the known confederate much more than neutral participants.
Ok, I know what you’re thinking. This doesn’t prove anything! They may just be following a reciprocity norm. Fair enough. But look at the second set of bars. If it were really reciprocity, then no increased helping should occur when a stranger requests help, as participants don’t owe this stranger anything. Yet, those who were feeling grateful still helped more. Simply put, gratitude functioned to push people to acquiesce to requests for help — even onerous ones from unknown others.
Importantly, another study showed that if we reminded the participants before they left that they were helped by the confederate, they didn’t help the stranger any more than control participants. By binding the emotional state so saliently to one person, it couldn’t be misattributed as a cue to help another, thereby indicating that the increased helping isn’t just adherence to a “pay-it-forward” norm. Yet participants still were paying-it-forward.
To me, this represents a spandrel effect for gratitude. Although its primary function is to make you feel grateful toward benefactors and thereby repay them at cost to yourself, there is a side benefit at the group level. If someone else just happens to ask for a favor while you’re feeling grateful, your odds of agreeing are higher.
As work by Nowak and Roch has suggested, mechanisms for such upstream reciprocity are fundamental to the development of cooperative society. But then again, they could also make you a sucker to a good con artist! On balance though, such emotional responses continue to lead me to believe that at heart, we’re designed to be prosocial.
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i’m always puzzled by psych researchers’ habits of secrecy…. wouldn’t we have an easier time making sense of this setup if we knew what the “onerous task” was? Are we talking about help screwing in a lightbulb? or about tax preparation?
This really gets at the problem with entitlement and coercive ‘charity.’
When Madison said that the constitution didn’t authorize the government to hand out charity or ‘benevolence’ – was he simply being a tightwad and curmudgeon? Was he asserting his own dominance over others because he wanted to direct his own charitable expenditures? Or was this decision made for good reason in the original constitution?
I’d argue that permitting people to do their own giving personally, and letting people on the receiving end of charity feel gratitude to real people, is the only way to benefit from all the good that has been proven to come from several phenomena – that charitable giving makes people feel unusually happy; that good fortune makes people feel very happy; and that gratitude makes everyone act better towards each other.
None of these occur – even can occur – when funds are coercively transferred among people. In fact, that dissipates the ‘potential energy’ of the money that was present in the inequality, but which could be put to work producing happiness for everyone by letting people give things away to people who can’t necessarily pay them back. If we think of it this way, inequality isn’t the cause of unhappiness – it is the cause of happiness – as long as it is being continually generated and continually dissipated.
For this to happen, people cannot be so distant from each other that the relatively wealthy and relatively impoverished dehumanize each other, never come into contact, etc. This would tend to extend and make fixed the inequalities.
However, it can’t happen if people are being equalized by force, or, as so often happens as a result, they spend their energy trying to avoid giving and trying to grasp or fight for their entitlements. Then, there is no giving, no boost of unexpected gain, no gratitude. There is only a sense of aggravation and loss on both sides.
I think this identifies why people/animals grow allegiances and attribute the ability to share a similar experience with another as personal morality. People and my dog are bursting with self-esteem when a solution works and willing to share that with another member of the community. It is a more positive aspect of group behavior.
It’s still hard to call it good, even if I like it. Because it implies that when people try, that means they are good. What is really unique about people and so much less true of my dog; is people will try and try and try and try until they learn how to get it right.
Conversely the greatest evil is giving up, or believing there is only one answer to the problem. Then people become the epitome of evil, willing to participate in unbelievable crimes, indifference and accept evil in other. It’s as easy for feeling good to be evil. A very good person is usually a very bad wizard… being a good wizard is the rare event we want.
along this vein, I’ve always felt that open giving is more ethical than anonymous giving because of the social inspiration effect as above
I have enjoyed reading the articles and the comments. Thanks.
I suspect that the same increase in agreeing to help a stranger would be invoked by simple exposure to people who are helping each other. It is my perception that we are highly attuned to our immediate social setting. We subconsciously look for cues about how to act. I bet you could readily manipulate a persons willingness to help a stranger simply by changing the scenes on posters along the hall they walk down.
These are rarified circumstances that allow detection of changes to ultimately small decisions. A more important decision would likely fire up some more careful analysis and be less swayed by setting.
Somewhere back in one of these posts, someone suggested lying is an effective survival strategy. Perhaps, but only in the very short term. Besides the obvious that in the real world no one will want to do business with a known liar (or it will all be on a cash basis), this sort of experiment shows that when you get to know someone and then also learn how to acknowledge when they have done you a service, you will get better results (schmoozing them in the best sense).
This series started with a post on hypocrisy, noting that politicians call each other hypocrites with increasing frequency during elections. It is a very effective campaign technique since it gives voters an excuse to dislike the opposing candidate without having to think about it, but I think pointing out the mote in someone else’s eye invites discussion of the beam in my eye (which as a rational person I have to admit is there).
For Ben, who believes that voluntary charity is better than ‘coercive charity’ because “charitable giving makes people feel unusually happy”: I refer you to John Steinbeck’s ‘The Log from the Sea of Cortez’: Giving builds up the ego of the giver, makes him superior and higher and larger than the receiver. Nearly always, giving is a selfish pleasure, and in many cases it is a downright destructive and evil thing. . . For giving can bring the same sense of superiority as getting does, and philanthropy may be another kind of spiritual avarice.”
Mr. Desteno mentions being set up for the next con. That is true, especially in a one play game such as the prisoner’s dilemma. However, humans play the multi-play variant of that, which is Tit for Tat. If someone treats you well, you tend to follow suit. The con is usually only a one-play game with each individual. After being burned, the victim usually becomes more cautious.
Another idea is that cooperation is, in a sense, self-fulfilling. Individuals tend to interact with like-minded individuals. This results in a situation where individuals tend to interact cooperatively within a group of interactors. If someone breaks the trust, the cheater not only pisses off the victim, but gets a reputation as a cheater and is ostracized by the whole group. In other words, there is an enforcement mechanism for cooperative behavior. Without such enforcement mechanisms, the whole enterprise would quickly be overrun by cheaters, which would be the logical strategy. In large groups (e.g. societies), cheaters can often get away with cheating, by moving between groups. However, large groups also tend to have mechanisms to dissuade cheating (e.g. laws).
Finally, there are dominance hierarchies that can disrupt or enforce cooperation. In a small group a strong individual can impose his or her will on others in the group. This can lead to group stability. It can also lead to autocracy.