I had a discussion with Gary Paul about altruism, and whether it truly exists. Mostly it was something I had blogged about before, but to save you (and me) the trouble of going back to find it, he mentioned how people who do "good deeds" may do them for the good feeling that comes from doing something nice, and not ask for anything in return, but if you think about it, that in itself is a reward for the deed, so in a sense, it's like they are getting something, so it's not entirely altruistic. Also, they may be doing the deed to help out a friend, in which case, their reward would be perhaps a future favour from the friend, or an increased standing in that friend's opinion.
I am one of those stupidly optimistic people in the sense that I believe people can be genuinely altruistic. Sure, a good deed may come with some sort of reward, but if you think about it, that reward may not nearly make up for the cost of doing the deed in the first place. If that is the case, then the altruistic person would be incurring a cost for doing the deed, and the overall gain for that person would be a loss, even if they managed to get some reward. When I had more time to bake things, I would sometimes drive out to people and give them whatever it was I baked. Most of the people I went to visit were at least 20-30 minutes away from me. Who is to say that the feeling I got from bringing someone something that might potentially poison a friend (I'm so evil) outweighed the time I lost during the delivery process, or the cost of the ingredients of said baked item? (Although, for the record, I haven't felt like it wasn't worth it for me in the past, so even though I don't see it as an altruistic act, I still hold the belief that one exists.) In this case, I'm working with a modified version of the word altruism in which the act is one in which a person does something that results in a net loss (or at least no net gain) for them.
I was reading a book about game theory, and in the book, the authors discussed a game called the Ultimatum Game. In the game, there are two players, A and B. They are to split some money between them, let's say $10. A can choose the amount that each person will receive (say $6:$4), and B will choose whether to accept or reject. If B accepts, then both players will receive the amount stipulated by A, but if B rejects, then both players receive nothing. If you look at both of the expected payoffs, you would think that B should accept whatever A suggests (except in the case of $10:$0, in which case it doesn't really matter to B whether they accept or reject because they'll get $0 either way, but they might reject just to "punish" A for being so selfish) as B is better off with whatever value A decides to give than with nothing at all. You would think then that it is in A's best interests to offer something like $9.90:10c to B, because A knows that B gets a better payoff from accepting that offer than rejecting it. However, the authors of the book, and other studies have found that A players tend to offer 50:50 values, and have attributed this to people's sense of "fairness".
There are obviously other things that can be attributed to A's seemingly generous offer, such as A's belief that B will reject anything that seems unfair to B, even if it means they both end up with nothing, as A believes B would rather end up with nothing than end up in a situation where A gets more than he should. There were more studies done with a variation of this game called the Dictator Game, in which A's role is the same, but B's role is simply to accept whatever A offers, so A is the "dictator" and decides who receives what. They found that A players still tended to offer 50:50 deals, even though there is no chance that B could reject it at all. I think this shows that people are willing to do what they think is "right" even if it results in no gain for them, and they even end up with a loss.
On a side note, they did some studies looking at how cultural backgrounds changed people's responses in the dictator game (this is all second-hand from the book, it was a reserve book from the library, so I had to return it, and really can't be bothered looking up the references now). They had women of Western backgrounds play with men from countries where women were believed to be inferior, and even though the women were offering 50:50 offers ,the men tended to offer 80:20 offers, believing that women do not deserve more than 4 times what a man receives.
I'm trying to think of a "truly" altruistic act, and just from the things that Gary Paul stated that make most seemingly altruistic acts not altruistic, it's hard. In order to negate the positive feeling that comes from doing something for someone, you'd have to either be the kind of person who doesn't get a kick from that kind of thing (in which case it would be not altruistic due to a personality difference rather than "truly" altruistic), or you would have to not know about it - or at least the good that came from the act. Then to negate the change of opinion in the good deed's recipient, or any other witnesses that happen to be there and who also think that it was a good deed, you'd have to make sure nobody else knows about it, including the beneficiary. My first thought was for you to set up a trust fund in which money was given to someone chosen by a third party, of whom you are unaware of, so you don't get to see the result of your action, but then you would have the good feeling of having set that trust up in the first place. So you would need to have the money there, and someone able to access it, but without your consent, or knowledge. Then a recipient has to receive your money (and be in need of it, since giving money to someone who is already filthy rich isn't really a good deed???) without knowledge that it's from you. Though if you use the second suggestion, then are you really doing a good deed, since this requires no action on your part (other than perhaps acquiring the money)? Maybe the good deed comes from your not complaining that some of your money has gone missing, but it seems strange that a good deed would result of inaction rather than some sort of action. If a large chunk of my money suddenly disappeared, I'd like to know what happened to it, so if it happened to me, I'd probably launch an investigation and end up finding out who the recipient of my money is and potentially be able to see the change in their quality of life since receiving the money and consequently gain a good feeling from it.
If you look at it from another point of view, is the good deed being done by the third party? They are acting as kind of a Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, and even though they're doing something bad to the first person you might think that the negative feeling that came from the loss of money for the rich guy would be less than the positive feeling that came from the gain of money for the poor guy (although I've never been rich, and I really don't know what it's like to lose a lot of money, I just know that losing $100 is a lot to me, but seems to be nothing to Julian - although that might just be due to his increased threshold of pain (to losing money). Not that I'm saying Julian is rich, I'm just trying to illustrate that losing various amounts of money has differing effects on people).
No comments:
Post a Comment