Fluent Essays

use the following articles to write a literature review. the work should be plagiarism free charity_and_anonimity__frietas_.pdf charity_and_facebook__erceg_.pdf charity__emotions_and_facebook__schattke_.pdf conformity_and_charity__nook_.pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview Journal of Experimental Psychology: General © 2018 American Psychological Association 0096-3445/19/$12.00 2019, Vol. 148, No. 1, 158 –173 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000507 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. Maimonides’ Ladder: States of Mutual Knowledge and the Perception of Charitability Julian De Freitas Peter DeScioli Harvard University Stony Brook University Kyle A. Thomas Steven Pinker MotiveMetrics, Palo Alto, California Harvard University Why do people esteem anonymous charitable giving? We connect normative theories of charitability (captured in Maimonides’ Ladder of Charity) with evolutionary theories of partner choice to test predictions on how attributions of charitability are affected by states of knowledge: whether the identity of the donor or of the beneficiary is revealed to the other. Consistent with the theories, in Experiments 1–2 participants judged a double-blind gift as more charitable than one to a revealed beneficiary, which in turn was judged as more charitable than one from a revealed donor. We also found one exception: Participants judged a donor who revealed only himself as slightly less, rather than more, charitable than one who revealed both identities. Experiment 3 explains the exception as a reaction to the donor’s perceived sense of superiority and disinterest in a social relationship. Experiment 4 found that donors were judged as more charitable when the gift was shared knowledge (each aware of the other’s identity, but unsure of the other’s awareness) than when it was common knowledge (awareness of awareness). Experiment 5, which titrated anonymity against donation size, found that not even a hundredfold larger gift could compensate for the disapproval elicited by a donor revealing his identity. Experiment 6 showed that participants’ judgments of charitability flip depending on whose perspective they take: Observers disapprove of donations that they would prefer as beneficiaries. Together, these experiments provide insight into why people care about how a donor gives, not just how much. Keywords: charity, partner choice, reciprocity, common knowledge Supplemental materials: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000507.supp people often criticize donors who seek too much credit for their beneficence, as seen in the outrage directed at two philanthropists who rescinded a $3 million gift to a zoo because the plaque showing their names was too small (Dunlap, 1997). The perceived merit of anonymous gifts is more than an abstract issue of normative ethical judgment. In modern times, charitable institutions are increasingly charged with solving some of the world’s most complex humanitarian problems, including hunger, disease, natural disasters, economic development, and political instability. A society’s collective choices about which gifts to praise, reward, and encourage can affect the flow of resources to these urgent problems. For instance, Dan Pallotta organized fundraising events like AIDSRides and Breast Cancer-3-Days that raised $305 million for charities. But his companies collapsed after complaints that they earned a profit. Pallotta said, wistfully, “People continue to die as a result . . . This we call morality” (Pallotta, 2009). Why do people care so much about a donor’s anonymity, recognition, or ulterior benefits? None of this has anything to do with how much a donation improves beneficiaries’ well-being. Why not embrace donors’ desires for recognition as a win–win opportunity to increase charitable giving? People tend to judge donors who give anonymously as more charitable and generous than those who give publicly. This conventional wisdom is the basis for an episode of the TV comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm in which Larry David donates money for a wing of a nonprofit building that is named after him and is chagrined to find that his rival, Ted Danson, donated money for the other wing anonymously while his identity leaked out, paradoxically reaping him the reputational advantages of both the gift and the anonymity. In experiments (Critcher & Dunning, 2011; LinHealy & Small, 2013; Newman & Cain, 2014) and in real life, This article was published Online First October 18, 2018. Julian De Freitas, Department of Psychology, Harvard University; Peter DeScioli, Department of Political Science, Stony Brook University; Kyle A. Thomas, MotiveMetrics, Palo Alto, California; Steven Pinker, Department of Psychology, Harvard University. For helpful suggestions, we thank Kurt Gray and Jason Nemirow. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Julian De Freitas, Department of Psychology, Harvard University, William James Hall 964, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. E-mail: defreitas@g.harvard.edu 158 ATTRIBUTIONS OF CHARITABILITY A Ladder of Charity This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. Deepening the puzzle is the fact that people not only distinguish anonymous from public gifts, but also appear to make finer distinctions based on the mutual knowledge of the donor and beneficiary. A famous example comes from the 12th-century Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who laid out a ladder of charitable giving (tzedakah, literally “righteousness”). Maimonides put double-blind gifts high on the ladder and common-knowledge gifts near the bottom, interspersed with other rungs based on the donor’s motivation and the beneficiary’s benefit over the long-term. The Ladder, from most to least charitable, is laid out as follows: 1. A donation that enables the beneficiary to escape the need for charity altogether (e.g., giving a gift or interestfree loan to start a business). 2. A double-blind donation (e.g., secretly leaving a gift in a courtyard where the poor can privately retrieve it without revealing themselves). 3. An anonymous donation to a known beneficiary (e.g., leaving a gift on their doorstep). 4. A revealed donation to an unknown beneficiary (e.g., the donor walks and drops money behind them for beneficiaries to pick up unseen). 5. A public donation that is given spontaneously (e.g., giving money in person). 6. A public donation that is solicited (e.g., granting a request for money). 7. A willing but inadequate donation. 8. A grudging donation, motivated by pity or guilt. Maimonides discussed two factors behind the Ladder (Maimonides, 1170/1180): (a) doing good deeds for their own sake rather than for praise or rewards, and (b) minimizing the embarrassment felt by the beneficiary. To illustrate doing charity for its own sake, Maimonides discussed an example in which donors left gifts for the needy in a secret chamber of a temple where beneficiaries could retrieve them in secrecy (Rung 2, double-blind). To illustrate minimizing embarrassment, Maimonides discussed an example in which sages wrapped coins in a scarf slung over their back so that the poor could pick them out without feeling embarrassed (Rung 4, revealed donor/unknown beneficiary). From Maimonides’s time to the present, the knowledge and motivation of the donor have figured prominently in normative theories of the inherent morality of charitable giving. In a 2018 article entitled True Generosity Involves More Than Just Giving, for example, the philosopher Christian Miller appears to channel his medieval predecessor by arguing that “virtues such as generosity are complicated. They involve more than just outward behavior. A person’s underlying thoughts, feelings and motives matter, too. If those aren’t in good shape, then one cannot qualify as a generous person” (Miller, 2018a; see also Miller, 2018b). Yet Miller is aware of the unresolved paradox that these inner feelings, however salient they are to our moral judgments, do not actually 159 feed the hungry or heal the sick, and notes “Generosity is a neglected virtue in academic research in general, and perhaps most of all in philosophy. There have been very few articles on generosity in mainstream philosophy journals since 1975.” (Miller, 2018a). His observation is true of mainstream psychology as well. Here we attempt to fill this gap by examining whether laypeople really do rank different kinds of charitable giving in a hierarchy of states of knowledge like Maimonides’ ladder, which we take as the best articulated explication of nonutilitarian factors in ascriptions of charitability. Though we make no normative claims about which acts truly deserve to be called charitable or righteous, we seek to explain people’s intuitions about charitability using evolutionary theories of partner choice and cooperation, which are the most explicit modern scientific explanations of the psychology of generosity. Reciprocity, Partner Choice, and Judgments of Charity To an evolutionary biologist, charitable donations are a kind of altruistic behavior, defined as instances in which one organism pays a cost to benefit another (Hamilton, 1996; Trivers, 1971, 1985; Wilson, 1975). The problem of altruism has been one of the central issues in evolutionary theory since the 1960s, and was a major topic in classics such as Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (Dawkins, 1976; Williams, 1966). The reason is obvious: Natural selection would seem to disfavor acts that benefit another organism at a cost to the actor, yet humans engage in many such acts of altruism, of which the quintessential example is charitable giving. The standard explanation was offered in Robert Trivers’ (1971) groundbreaking article on reciprocal altruism. In direct reciprocity, two cooperative partners can each benefit by exchanging favors, such as grooming each other, alternating child care, or trading surplus goods such as wool for milk (Trivers, 1971). Similarly, altruism can be favored by indirect reciprocity, in which cooperation enhances an individual’s reputation, bringing favors from others in the future (Hardy & Van Vugt, 2006; Nowak & Sigmund, 2005; Wu, Balliet, & Van Lange, 2016). But these theories predict that any tendency toward altruistic giving should coevolve with a desire to make the gift public. This way, beneficiaries and third parties can easily track who has given, ensuring that giving pays off in the long run by being reciprocated. Yet this appears to be the exact opposite of the esteem people grant to anonymous donors. We propose that the resolution to this paradox lies in an important corollary to Trivers’ theory which he called the problem of “subtle cheating,” but which is referred to in recent literature as partner choice. When people face a set of possible cooperative partners who vary in their disposition for generosity, there will be complementary selection pressures for observers to discern those with the greatest dispositional generosity and for potential partners to advertise honest signals of such generosity (Trivers, 1971). This creates a kind of market in which people compete for the best cooperative partners (Barclay, 2016; Baumard, André, & Sperber, 2013; Noë & Hammerstein, 1995; Trivers, 1971). Among a set of potential cooperators in a community, some are more generous than others and hence make for more profitable partners. Specifically, partners vary in how small a profit they are willing to settle for in an exchange, and in their willingness to incur short-term This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. 160 DE FREITAS, DESCIOLI, THOMAS, AND PINKER losses to cultivate the relationship over the long term (Trivers, 1971). In the search for good partners, an individual is aided by accurately assessing others’ underlying generosities, whereas inaccurately assessing others leads to inefficiencies such as sharing precious resources with someone who calculatingly reciprocates the bare minimum (this is what Trivers called “subtle cheating”). The fundamental problem of partner choice may have shaped our judgments of altruism, leading people to judge as most charitable those who deliver the largest benefits and require the least in return. This could elevate donors who give anonymously: Because anonymous donors provide benefits with little expectation of favors in return, they show a generous disposition that makes them desirable and profitable cooperative partners. Of course, this entails the paradoxical circumstance in which the identity of an “anonymous” donor is known to at least some observers, as in the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode, and the prevalence of such circumstances has long been noted, as in the quotation attributed to Oscar Wilde “The nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously—and have somebody find out.” Public donors have also displayed generosity, but because they could gain reputation and future favors, it is not clear that they would be as generous when they have little to gain themselves. The challenge of choosing cooperative partners is closely related to the classic problem of attribution from social psychology (Gilbert & Malone, 1995; Kelley, 1967). When people observe how other individuals behave, they attribute the behavior in varying degrees to the actor’s underlying disposition, to the external circumstances, or to an interaction between them. Partner choice theory predicts that this process will be particularly engaged when observers learn of actors giving resources to others, which prompts them to assess the donor’s underlying generous disposition in order to evaluate them as a potential cooperative partner. (Note that this presupposes that people meaningfully vary in charitable disposition, as opposed to generosity being determined completely by the situation or beneficiary.) Importantly, the idea that charitability is an attribution problem predicts that people will prioritize certain kinds of cues as reliably indicating a generous disposition. How a donor gives is a particularly informative cue, potentially even more informative than the amount of the gift, because it indicates the dispositions that prompted the donor. Individuals who are skilled “judges of character” can leverage their mental-state reasoning to attribute dispositional generosity more accurately, allowing them to choose the most rewarding partners. In short, the theory of reciprocal altruism with its partner choice corollary can explain why people attribute greater generosity to donors who provide less knowledge of their gifts. The partner choice hypothesis for judgments of charitability is distinct from several major alternatives. First, as mentioned, traditional reciprocity theories are rooted in reputation, which promotes cooperation rather than diminishing it, so these models straightforwardly predict that people will prefer transparent and public donations to help them keep track of cooperators—which is flatly at odds with people’s praise for anonymous donors. Second, although classic attribution theories address how people infer dispositions (Gilbert & Malone, 1995; Kelley, 1967), they do not specifically predict that these inferences are attuned to the cues that inform people’s cooperative strategies. Finally, an evolutionary approach goes beyond simple rational choice accounts by grounding psychological theories in the evo- lutionary processes that shaped human social behavior, whether apparently rational or irrational (Cosmides & Tooby, 1994). A simple rational choice theory predicts, for instance, that people should lack strong feelings about the charitability of celebrities they’ll never meet, and that they should judge acts of charity based on objective benefits bestowed upon the beneficiary. Indeed, a rational utilitarian should prefer public donations, because these incentivize donors to give more, maximizing the benefit to the needy. Evolutionary theories, in contrast, hold that our cognitive and emotional faculties evolved in small-scale societies in which personal favor-trading was essential to fitness and any individual who was seen or mentioned by others was likely to be encountered face-to-face at some point in the future (Krasnow, Delton, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2013). This can explain why humans today are obsessed with judging people’s characters, even of people they will never meet, and even when the person’s character is irrelevant to their stated goal, in this case philanthropy aimed at alleviating hunger, poverty, or disease. In short, judgments of charitability might be shaped by psychological systems for choosing the best cooperative partners (Curry & Chesters, 2012; Tooby & Cosmides, 1996; Trivers, 1971). This theory predicts that people are equipped with cognitive systems for detecting and keeping track of cues that indicate a disposition for generosity, including the way a donor gives. The Partner Choice Hypothesis and States of Knowledge We hypothesize that people’s judgments about a donor’s charitability indeed fall into a hierarchy, as Maimonides suggested, because our intuitions of righteousness are related to assessments of cooperative partners. Specifically, a subset of the rungs of the Ladder of Charity (those based on states of knowledge, the focus of this article) may be related to the theory of partner choice as follows: ● Rung 2: Anonymous Donor, Unknown Beneficiary Double-blind giving is the most diagnostic evidence of dispositional generosity, because the donor has removed the possibility of receiving return favors altogether. ● Rung 3: Anonymous Donor, Known Beneficiary If the donor knows the beneficiary but not vice versa (e.g., a gift left on a doorstep), this relieves the beneficiary of an obligation to reciprocate directly. Furthermore, the donor forgoes any reputational benefit that might facilitate indirect reciprocation from third parties. However, unlike Rung 2, such a donor could potentially reveal himself or herself to the beneficiary later to try to call in a favor. This vulnerability may be experienced by the beneficiary in negative emotions like guilt, obligation, and, if made public, lowliness or shame. ● Rung 4: Public Donor, Unknown Beneficiary Such a donor (e.g., one who carries coins in a backpack for the poor to pick out) cannot obligate the beneficiary to reciprocate directly, although the beneficiary could volunteer to do so. Importantly, the beneficiary could tell others about the donor’s good ATTRIBUTIONS OF CHARITABILITY deed and improve his or her reputation, leading to indirect reciprocity from others. The possibility of receiving both direct and indirect reciprocity makes this donor seem less charitable than a donor on Rung 3, who can benefit only from direct reciprocity. This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. ● Rung 5: Public Donor, Known Beneficiary When the donor and beneficiary know each other, as when one places money into the other’s hand, this creates an obligation for the beneficiary to pay back the donor should the donor need help in the future.1 This is because the donation is common knowledge: The donor and beneficiary know each other, they both know that they both know this, and so forth, ad infinitum, a knowledge state that enables coordination and has been shown to have many psychological effects (see, e.g., Chwe, 2001; Thomas, De Freitas, DeScioli, & Pinker, 2016; Thomas, DeScioli, Haque, & Pinker, 2014). In addition to ... Purchase answer to see full attachment