Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

by Joshua D. Greene

There clearly are things you can do that relieve a lot of suffering while requiring comparably little sacrifice on your part. How much sacrifice should you make? Again, there’s no magic formula, and it all depends on your personal circumstances and limitations. There’s a social dimension to the problem that may, in the long run, favor strong efforts over heroic ones. Your life is a model for others, especially your children (if you have children). If you improve the lives of hundreds of people every year through your charitable donations, but your life remains happy and comfortable, you’re a model that others can emulate. If, instead, you push yourself to just shy of your breaking point, you may do more good directly with your personal donation dollars, but you may undermine the larger cause by making an unappealing example of yourself. Promoting a moderate, sustainable culture of altruism may, in the long run, do more good than pushing yourself to your personal limit. Heroes who make enormous sacrifices for others are “inspiring,” but when it comes to motivating real-world behavior, research shows that the best way to get people to do something good is to tell them that their neighbors are already doing it.