The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

wealthy people often perform unskilled volunteer work (and are celebrated for it), even when their time is worth vastly more on the open market.16 Here’s Miller again: The division of labor is economically efficient, in charity as in business. Instead, in most modern cities of the world, we can observe highly trained lawyers, doctors, and their husbands and wives giving up their time to work in soup kitchens for the homeless or to deliver meals to the elderly. Their time may be worth a hundred times the standard hourly rates for kitchen workers or delivery drivers. For every hour they spend serving soup, they could have donated an hour’s salary to pay for somebody else to serve soup for two weeks.

These behaviors don’t make sense if we try to explain charity-related behaviors as an attempt to maximize ROD.

we do charity in part because of a selfish psychological motive: it makes us happy. Part of the reason we give to homeless people on the street, for example, is because the act of donating makes us feel good, regardless of the results.

Andreoni calls this the “warm glow” theory. It helps explain why so few of us behave like effective altruists. Consider these two strategies for giving to charity: (1) setting up an automatic monthly payment to the Against Malaria Foundation, or (2) giving a small amount to every panhandler, collection plate, and Girl Scout. Making automatic payments to a single charity may be more efficient at improving the lives of others, but the other strategy—giving more widely, opportunistically, and in smaller amounts—is more efficient at generating those warm fuzzy feelings.20 When we “diversify” our donations, we get more opportunities to feel good.

Digging beneath the shallow psychological motive (pursuing happiness), what deeper incentives are we responding to? To figure this out, we’re going to examine five factors that influence our charitable behavior:

1.Visibility. We give more when we’re being watched. 2.Peer pressure. Our giving responds strongly to social influences. 3.Proximity. We prefer to help people locally rather than globally. 4.Relatability. We give more when the people we help are identifiable (via faces and/or stories) and give less in response to numbers and facts. 5.Mating motive. We’re more generous when primed with a mating motive.

Other charities help their donors by hosting conspicuous events—places to see and be seen. These include races, walk-a-thons, charity balls, benefit concerts, and even social media campaigns like the “ice bucket challenge.” By helping donors advertise their generosity, charities incentivize more donations.

Conversely, people prefer not to give when their contributions won’t be recognized. Anonymous donation, for example, is extremely rare. Only around 1 percent of donations to public charities are anonymous.

Not surprisingly, the vast majority of donations to such campaigns fall exactly at the lower end of each tier.30 Put another way: very few people give more than they’ll be recognized for.

Although donors often deny this influence,31 the evidence says otherwise. First of all, solicitation works: people donate when they’re asked for money, especially by friends, neighbors, and loved ones. People seldom initiate donations on their own; up to 95 percent of all donations are given in response to a solicitation.

Jonathan Baron and Ewa Szymanska call this bias parochialism. When they surveyed people about their willingness to help people in their own country (the United States) versus children in India, Africa, or Latin America, people showed a distinct preference for helping others in their own country. As one subject commented, “There are just as many needy children in this country and I would help them first.”

we’re much more likely to help someone we can identify—a specific individual with a name,39 a face, and a story.

identifiable victim effect. The corresponding downside, of course, is that we’re less likely to help victims who aren’t identifiable. As Joseph Stalin is reported to have said, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”

Many studies have found that people, especially men, are more likely to give money when the solicitor is an attractive member of the opposite sex.46 Men also give more to charity when nearby observers are female rather than male.

The thought of pursuing a romantic partner made them more eager to do good deeds. This, however, was true only of conspicuous good deeds, like teaching underprivileged kids or volunteering at a homeless shelter. When asked about inconspicuous forms of altruism, like taking shorter showers or mailing a letter someone had dropped on the way to the post office, the experimental group was no more likely than the control group to report an interest in such activities.

In light of all this evidence, the conclusion is pretty clear. We may get psychological rewards for anonymous donations, but for most people, the “warm fuzzies” just aren’t enough. We also want to be seen as charitable. Griskevicius calls this phenomenon “blatant benevolence.” Patrick West calls it “conspicuous compassion.”51 The idea is that we’re motivated to appear generous, not simply to be generous, because we get social rewards only for what others notice. In other words, charity is an advertisement, a way of showing off.

And yet, we mostly don’t donate anonymously; we are concerned (at least at an unconscious level) with getting credit. So let’s dig a bit deeper into our showing-off motive. By giving to charity, who, exactly, are we hoping to impress? And which qualities are we trying to advertise?

one of our primary audiences is potential mates. Giving to charity is, in part, a behavior designed to attract members of the opposite sex.55 Stinginess isn’t sexy.

It’s also telling that people advertise their philanthropic activities on resumes and in capsule biographies, and that colleges ask students about volunteer work during the admissions process. Politicians also trumpet their generosity when running for office. (In fact, generosity is a prized attribute of leaders around the world.58) In other words, charity serves to impress not just potential mates, but also social and political gatekeepers.

The other important question to ask is “Why does charity make us attractive to mates, teammates, and social gatekeepers?” In other words, which qualities are we demonstrating when we donate, volunteer, or otherwise act selflessly? Here again there are a few different answers.

The most obvious thing we advertise is wealth, or in the case of volunteer work, spare time.59 In effect, charitable behavior “says” to our audiences, “I have more resources than I need to survive; I can give them away without worry. Thus I am a hearty, productive human specimen.

This is the same logic that underlies our tendency toward conspicuous consumption, conspicuous athleticism, and other fitness displays. All else being equal, we prefer our associates—whether friends, lovers, or leaders—to be well off. Not only does some of their status “rub off” on us, but it means they have more resources and energy to fo...

Charity also helps us advertise our prosocial orientation, that is, the degree to which we’re aligned with others. (We might ...

When we donate to a good cause, it “says” to our associates, “Look, I’m willing to spend my resources for the benefit of others. I’m playing a positive-sum, cooperative game with society.” This helps explain why generosity is so important for those who aspire to leadership. No one wants leaders who play zero-sum, competitive games with the rest of society.

The fact that we use charity to advertise our prosocial orientation helps explain why, as a general rule, we do so little original research to determine where to donate. Original research generates private information about which charities are worthy, but in order to signal how prosocial we are, we need to donate to charities that are publicly known to be worthy.

There’s one final quality that charity allows us to advertise: the spontaneous, almost involuntary concern for the welfare of others. Variations on this trait go by various names—empathy, sympathy, pity, compassion. When we notice someone suffering and immediately decide to help them, it “says” to our associates, “See how easily I’m moved to help others? When people near me are suffering, I can’t help wanting to make their situation better; it’s just who I am.” This is a profoundly useful trait to advertise; it means you’ll make a great ally. The more time other people spend around you, the more they’ll get to partake of your spontaneous good will.

Most donors don’t sketch out a giving strategy and follow through as though it were a business plan. Instead we tend to donate spontaneously—in

Why? Because spontaneous giving demonstrates how little choice we have in the matter, how it’s simply part of our character to help the people in front of us.

For the psychologist Paul Bloom, this is a huge downside. Empathy, he argues, focuses our attention on single individuals, leading us to become both parochial and insensitive to scale.

As Bertrand Russell is often reported to have said, “The mark of a civilized man is the capacity to read a column of numbers and weep,”63 but few of us are capable of truly feeling statistics in this way. If only we could be moved more by our heads than our hearts, we could do a lot more good.

And yet the incentives to show empathy and spontaneous compassion are overwhelming. Think about it: Which kind of people are likely to make better friends, coworkers, and spouses—“calculators” who manage their generosity with a spreadsheet, or “emoters” who simply can’t help being moved to help people right in front of them? Sensing that emoters, rather than calculators, are generally preferred as allies, our brains are keen to advertise that we are emoters. Spontaneous generosity may not be the most effective way to improve human w...

We therefore use charity, in part, as a means to advertise some of our good qualities, in particular our wealth, prosocial orientation, and compassion. This view helps explain why some activities that help others aren’t celebrated as acts of charity.

Insofar as the goal of charity is to help others, Methuselah trusts are a potentially great way to do it. But very few people give to such trusts. In part, this is because helping people in the far future doesn’t showcase our empathy or prosocial orientation.

In terms of providing value to others, marginal charity is extremely efficient. It does a substantial amount of good for others at very little cost to oneself. (In other words, it has an incredible ROD.) But at the same time, marginal charity utterly fails as a way to advertise good qualities.

This is the perverse conclusion we must accept. The forms of charity that are most effective at helping others aren’t the most effective at helping donors signal their good traits. And when push comes to shove, donors will often choose to help themselves.

If we, as a society, want more and better charity, we need to figure out how to make it more rewarding for individual donors.

Education Why do students go to school? Our society’s standard answer is so obvious that it seems hardly worth discussing. It is almost shouted from every school transcript and class syllabus: to learn the material.

More generally, we might say that students go to school to improve themselves, typically with an eye to their future careers.

In what follows (much of which is cribbed from Bryan Caplan’s excellent new book The Case Against Education), we’ll show how “learning” doesn’t account for the full value of education,

In both cases, students sacrifice useful learning opportunities for an easier path to a degree. In fact, if we gave students a straight choice between getting an education without a degree, or a degree without an education, most would pick the degree—which seems odd if they’re going to school mainly to learn.

The degree is just an approximate measure of how much they learned, so they might be tempted to cut corners along the way. What’s more puzzling is the extent to which employers value the degree, above and beyond all the learning that went into earning it.

Employers seem to care about something besides what students learn in classes.

For example, much of what schools bother to teach is of little use in real jobs. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are clearly useful. But high school students spend 42 percent of their time on rarely useful topics such as art, foreign language, history, social science, and “personal use”

In college we find a similar tolerance for impractical subjects.

(Of course, there’s much more to life than becoming a productive worker, and school could conceivably help in these regards, e.g., by helping to make students “well-rounded” or to “broaden their horizons.” But this seems like a cop-out, and your two coauthors are extremely skeptical that schools are mostly trying to achieve such functions. We ask ourselves, “Is sitting in a classroom for six hours a day really the best way to create a broad, well-rounded human being?”)

Even more troubling for the “learning” story, however, is the fact that even when useful material is taught, students don’t retain it long enough to apply it later in life.

School advocates often argue that school teaches students “how to learn” or “how to think critically.” But these claims, while comforting, don’t stand up to scrutiny.

“Educational psychologists,” writes Caplan, “have measured the hidden intellectual benefits of education for over a century. Their chief discovery is that education is narrow. As a rule, students only learn the material you specifically teach them.”

Another systems-level failure is that schools consistently fail to use better teaching methods, even methods that have been known for decades. For example, students learn worse when they’re graded, especially when graded on a curve.7 Homework helps students learn in math, but not in science, English, or history.8 And practice that’s spaced out, varied, and interleaved with other learning produces more versatility, longer retention, and better mastery. While this feels slower and harder, it works better.9 Instead, most schools grade students frequently (often on curves), give homework, and lump material together in ways that make it feel like students are learning faster, when in fact they’re learning less.

signaling.14 The basic idea is that students go to school not so much to learn useful job skills as to show off their work potential to future employers. In other words, the value of education isn’t just about learning; it’s also about credentialing.