The Instinct to Share Our Good Fortune.

"What would you do if suddenly, out of the blue, someone gave you $10,000? Buy a new couch? Give your grandson a trip to New York? Make a big donation to help Maui fire victims? It's fun to daydream, but this simple scenario may help to answer one of the deepest questions about human nature. Are we fundamentally selfish or altruistic?

Elizabeth Dunn and colleagues at the University of British Columbia and Chris Anderson, the head of TED (the foundation behind all those TED talks), have a new paper in the journal Psychological Science. They didn't just ask people to speculate about a windfall, they actually made it happen. A rich couple bankrolled gifts of $10,000 each to 200 people around the world and distributed the money through TED.

The gift came with two provisos: You had to spend it all in three months, and you had to use an anonymous questionnaire to keep track of how you spent it. The experimenters told half the people that they should also describe their spending on Twitter. They told the other half that they should keep it to themselves.

For a long time economists assumed that people, at bottom, act in their own self-interest. Even when they seem generous, they're really only concerned about what other people will think of them. But more recently, psychologists and behavioral economists have found that some people may be intrinsically altruistic. Even very young children will spontaneously go out of their way to help others.

The most extensive evidence for natural altruism comes from "the dictator game," invented in 1986 by Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning father of behavioral economics, as a simple way to test generosity. A participant is given some money, maybe $10 or $20, and can decide whether to give some of it anonymously to another person.

"Homo economicus" ought to just keep it all, and some people do just that. But on average, across hundreds of studies with thousands of participants in many different countries, people consistently give away about 28% of the money. People in non-industrialized countries give a bit more than people in market economies, women give more than men, and older people give more than younger ones. But everybody is generous overall.

Still, there's something artificial about these experiments. The participants were mostly college students in a lab who knew they were in a study, and the stakes were mostly quite small. What would people do in real life with serious money? Would they keep it for themselves or give it to others? And would it make a difference if their decisions were public or private?

The new study was designed to ask those questions. And the answers were encouraging.

The participants didn't know anything about the point of the study, and their responses were anonymous. But people in both rich and poor countries gave about 60% of the money to others. Often the money went to friends and family, but around 20% went to strangers, much like the typical proportion in the dictator game. What's more, it didn't matter whether the participants announced their decisions publicly, as we might expect if generosity is mostly motivated by wanting approval.

This study is particularly dramatic, but it supports the general idea that humans are as naturally generous as they are naturally selfish. The big question this raises is harder than deciding between buying that couch and helping Maui: How can we design a political and economic system that encourages this generous spirit?" [1]

1. REVIEW --- Mind & Matter: The Instinct to Share Our Good Fortune. Gopnik, Alison. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 26 Aug 2023: C.5.