Charles Camic Kieran Bezila Northwestern University

Comprehending the social roots of altruistic behavior is important both to accurately study the phenomenon and to understand the circumstances in which altruistic behavior flourishes, or is suppressed. This research posits that the expression of altruistic behavior is a rational individual decision that is also a function of particular sets of social circumstances - those in which individuals feel they are making a strategic, personal investment in a communal ethic of mutual cooperation, which has the likelihood of benefiting themselves and others in the future. This theory is tested experimentally via a "public goods" game, an economic "social dilemma" scenario in which group members receive varying incentives for cooperation and competition and must decide how to behave and how to coordinate their behavior. An innovative "career" design is employed, to vary the composition of the groups in standardized ways that players must anticipate and respond to. The theory predicts that the ability of individuals to help regulate and regularize group behavior, through precedent and modeling behaviors and the effectiveness of sanctioning behavior, will determine the level of cooperation and altruism displayed. Furthermore, anticipation of particular future social configurations, and the likelihood of cooperation or competition within these groups, will also affect the level of cooperation and altruism displayed.

Broader Impacts

Research findings will make a valuable empirical and theoretical contribution to disciplinary understandings of altruism, cooperation and group behavior, as well as providing a refined theoretical grounding for future empirical examinations of altruistic behavior and cooperation and competition within groups. This research also has direct implications for real-world problems of coordination, cooperation and social order. Modeling circumstances in which individuals are willing to defer immediate personal gains in favor of prospective collective gains has applicability to a wide variety of domains, and concrete social policy issues such as volunteering, charitable giving, public provisioning of welfare and social security systems, and organ donation rates.

Project Report

This project tested a new theory of altruistic behavior. Traditionally, altruism has been seen as a questionable behavior – it does not seem to make logical or evolutionary sense to help others without getting anything for oneself in return. Disciplines such as economics, evolutionary biology, psychology and sociology have therefore viewed altruism as being "impure", that is, actually motivated by either by a secret egoism (‘altruists’ actually get something in return for what they give, if only personal satisfaction), or as motivated by social forces such as norms and social pressures. In contrast, this research theorizes that altruism operates more akin to a "pay it forward" model: altruists impose immediate personal costs onto themselves in return for hopeful collective future gains. In other words, altruists help specific people with the idea that their helping behavior will provide a model and impulse for these people to help others, and at some point, as helping others becomes a wider norm, the good deed with return to them. This theory was tested through a "public goods game" in which groups of four people are given a sum of money and individually decide how much to contribute to a collective pot, without knowing what other members are contributing. The money in the pot is multiplied and divided equally, and the game repeats. There are opposing collective and individual strategies in the game – if all players cooperate, they will all make more money than if any defect. However, if any one player acts selfishly, choosing to give little to nothing ("free-riding") when others are contributing a lot, this player may do better than most at the expense of the others. These types of games are meant to model collective efforts to fund public goods, such as paying a fare to ride the subway, versus jumping the turnstile (free-riding), or cheating at taxes, but still consuming public resources. This experiment added a unique dimension to the standard public goods game by having sixteen simultaneous players and mixing them among four groups over the course of sixteen periods according to a specific pre-determined plan. This randomly assigns each player a specific and unique trajectory through the game that varies their relatedness to other players. Some players are grouped with each other throughout the sixteen periods; others never interact with the same people again. In other words, for some players, their current actions may have clear future repercussions, and for others, there are few conceivable repercussions. Players are fully informed of the specific nature of their individual trajectories before and during the game. A number of hypotheses then tested whether this knowledge changed how generous people were in their game behavior – whether they were likely to contribute more without knowing others’ intentions when they knew they were more likely to continue to interact with the same people. The findings supported the overall theory. Although there was not a consistent increase in specific amount of contribution directly correlating with the categorization of players as most-to-least related (the top group of most-related players did contribute significantly more), there was a clear tendency of players in the least-related category to contribute zero to the group pot most often, while players in more-related conditions would contribute zero significantly less often, with the most related group giving contributions of zero the least often. In other words, there is evidence that individuals’ understanding of their future relatedness and interactions with others affects their level of generosity. People are likely to be more generous when they believe their generous behavior may establish a positive precedent that may come to benefit them in the future. In this case, altruism may have a strategic dimension. People may not be looking to immediately ‘get something out of it’, but they may be doing it with a goal of increasing cooperation and positive interactions in a way that will come to benefit all, including themselves, at unspecified points in the future. This suggests that a key to increasing altruism and cooperation, or simply generous behavior, may be to create systems or opportunities in which individuals have a sense of confidence that their generosity will not be exploited or simply consumed and forgotten, but will instead encourage others to act likewise, evoking a norm of generous behavior. Such a "pay it forward" strategy is a new way of understanding altruism.

Agency
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Institute
Division of Social and Economic Sciences (SES)
Type
Standard Grant (Standard)
Application #
1003820
Program Officer
Patricia White
Project Start
Project End
Budget Start
2010-04-15
Budget End
2011-09-30
Support Year
Fiscal Year
2010
Total Cost
$7,600
Indirect Cost
Name
Northwestern University at Chicago
Department
Type
DUNS #
City
Chicago
State
IL
Country
United States
Zip Code
60611