Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Article
  • Published:

An evolutionary explanation for ineffective altruism

Nature Human Behaviour volume 4, pages 1245–1257 (2020)Cite this article

Subjects

Abstract

We donate billions to charities each year, yet much of our giving is ineffective. Why are we motivated to give but not to give effectively? Building on evolutionary game theory, we argue that donors evolved (genetically or culturally) to be insensitive to efficacy because people tend not to reward efficacy, as social rewards tend to depend on well-defined and highly observable behaviours. We present five experiments testing key predictions of this account that are difficult to reconcile with alternative accounts based on cognitive or emotional limitations. Namely, we show that donors are more sensitive to efficacy when helping (1) themselves or (2) their families. Moreover, (3) social rewarders don’t condition on efficacy or other difficult-to-observe behaviours (4, 5), such as the amount donated.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on Springer Link
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Fig. 1: Study 1: savings but not donations were sensitive to multipliers.
Fig. 2: Study 2: willingness to pay and empathy were sensitive to the number helped for family members but not for strangers.
Fig. 3: Study 3: social rewards were sensitive to whether a donor gave but not to the match rate.
Fig. 4: Studies 4 and 5: social rewards were sensitive to whether a donor gave but not to the amount or fraction donated.

Similar content being viewed by others

Data availability

The data that support the findings reported in this paper are available from the corresponding author upon request.

References

  1. Baron, J. & Greene, J. Determinants of insensitivity to quantity in valuation of public goods: contribution, warm glow, budget constraints, availability, and prominence. J. Exp. Psychol. Appl. 2, 107–125 (1996).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Kahneman, D., Ritov, I., Schkade, D., Sherman, S. J. & Varian, H. R. Economic preferences or attitude expressions? An analysis of dollar responses to public issues. J. Risk Uncertain. 19, 203–235 (1999).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Berman, J. Z., Barasch, A., Levine, E. E. & Small, D. A. Impediments to effective altruism: the role of subjective preferences in charitable giving. Psych. Sci. 29, 834–844 (2018).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Giving USA: The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year of 2015 (Giving USA Foundation, 2016).

  5. Volunteering in the United States, 2015 Economic News Release (Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor, 2016); https://www.bls.gov/news.release/volun.nr0.htm

  6. Lindsey, D. Who’s raising the most: The 100 charities that are America’s favorites. The Chronicles of Philanthropy https://www.philanthropy.com/article/Who-s-Raising-the-Most-The/244933 (2018).

  7. Top Charities (GiveWell, 2020); https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities?utm_expid=.QIUuueagRBqB_qsw6bI8xg.0&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F

  8. Your Dollar Goes Further Overseas (GiveWell, 2016); https://www.givewell.org/giving101/Your-dollar-goes-further-overseas

  9. Ord, T. The Moral Imperative Toward Cost-Effectiveness in Global Health (Center for Global Development, 2013).

  10. Singer, P. The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas about Living Ethically (Yale Univ. Press, 2015).

  11. Desvousges, W. H. et al. Measuring Nonuse Damages Using Contingent Valuation: An Experimental Evaluation of Accuracy 2nd edn (RTI International, 1992).

  12. Rondeau, D. & List, J. A. Matching and challenge gifts to charity: evidence from laboratory and natural field experiments. Exp. Econ. 11, 253–267 (2008).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Karlan, D., List, J. A. & Shafir, E. Small matches and charitable giving: evidence from a natural field experiment. J. Public Econ. 95, 344–350 (2011).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. Prospect theory: an analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica 47, 263–291 (1979).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Jenni, K. & Loewenstein, G. Explaining the identifiable victim effect. J. Risk Uncertain. 14, 235–257 (1997).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Small, D. A. & Loewenstein, G. Helping a victim or helping the victim: altruism and identifiability. J. Risk Uncertain. 26, 5–16 (2003).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Bloom, P. Empathy and its discontents. Trends Cogn. Sci. 21, 24–31 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Andreoni, J. Impure altruism and donations to public goods: a theory of warm-glow giving. Econ. J. 100, 464–477 (1990).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Nowak, M. A. Five rules for the evolution of cooperation. Science 314, 1560–1563 (2006).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  20. Panchanathan, K. & Boyd, R. Indirect reciprocity can stabilize cooperation without the second-order free rider problem. Nature 432, 499–502 (2004).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  21. Hoffman, M, Yoeli, E. & Navarrete, C. D. in The Evolution of Morality (eds Shakelford, T. & Hansen, R.) 289–316 (Springer, 2016).

  22. Nowak, M. A. Evolutionary Dynamics (Harvard Univ. Press, 2006).

  23. Fudenberg, D. & Maskin, E. The folk theorem in repeated games with discounting or with incomplete information. Econometrica 54, 533–554 (1986).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Freitas, J. D., Thomas, K., DeScioli, P. & Pinker, S. Common knowledge, coordination, and strategic mentalizing in human social life. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 116, 13751–13758 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. DeScioli, P. & Kurzban, R. Mysteries of morality. Cognition 112, 281–299 (2009).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Darwin, C. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (P.F. Collier & Son, 1859).

  27. Hamilton, W. D. The evolution of altruistic behavior. Am. Nat. 97, 354–356 (1963).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Henrich, J. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (Princeton Univ. Press, 2015).

  29. Barclay, P. Biological markets and the effects of partner choice on cooperation and friendship. Curr. Opin. Psychol. 7, 33–38 (2016).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Gintis, H., Smith, E. A. & Bowles, S. Costly signaling and cooperation. J. Theor. Biol. 213, 103–119 (2001).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  31. Alpizar, F., Carlsson, F. & Johansson-Stenman, O. Anonymity, reciprocity, and conformity: evidence from voluntary contributions to a national park in Costa Rica. J. Public Econ. 92, 1047–1060 (2008).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  32. Kraft-Todd, G., Yoeli, E., Bhanot, S. & Rand, D. Promoting cooperation in the field. Curr. Opin. Behav. Sci. 3, 96–101 (2015).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  33. Goldstein, N. J., Cialdini, R. B. & Griskevicius, V. A room with a viewpoint: using social norms to motivate environmental conservation in hotels. J. Consum. Res. 35, 472–482 (2008).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  34. Hamlin, J. K. & Wynn, K. Young infants prefer prosocial to antisocial others. Cogn. Dev. 26, 30–39 (2011).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Almenberg J., Dreber, A., Apicella, C. L., & Rand, D. G. in Psychology of Punishment (eds Palmetti, N. M. & Russo, J. P.) 73–92 (Nova Publishers, 2011).

  36. McAuliffe, K., Jordan, J. J. & Warneken, F. Costly third-party punishment in young children. Cognition 134, 1–10 (2015).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  37. Fehr, E., Fischbacher, U. & Gächter, S. Strong reciprocity, human cooperation, and the enforcement of social norms. Hum. Nat. 13, 1–25 (2002).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  38. Hamlin, J. K., Wynn, K., Bloom, P. & Mahajan, N. How infants and toddlers react to antisocial others. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 108, 19931–19936 (2011).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  39. Jordan, J. J., Hoffman, M., Bloom, P. & Rand, D. G. Third-party punishment as a costly signal of trustworthiness. Nature 530, 473–476 (2016).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  40. Raihani, N. J. & Bshary, R. Why humans might help strangers. Front. Behav. Neurosci. 9, 39 (2015).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  41. Alger, I. & Weibull, J. W. Homo moralis—preference evolution under incomplete information and assortative matching. Econometrica 81, 2269–2302 (2013).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  42. Wilson, D. & Sober, E. Reintroducing group selection to the human behavioral sciences. Behav. Brain Sci. 17, 585–608 (1994).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  43. Boyd, R. A Different Kind of Animal: How Culture Transformed Our Species Vol. 46 (Princeton Univ. Press, 2017).

  44. Henrich, J., Heine, S. J. & Norenzayan, A. Most people are not WEIRD. Nature 466, 29 (2010).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  45. Aktipis, A. et al. Cooperation in an uncertain world: for the Maasai of East Africa, need-based transfers outperform account-keeping in volatile environments. Hum. Ecol. 44, 353–364 (2016).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  46. Gurven, M. Tolerated reciprocity, reciprocal scrounging, and unrelated kin: making sense of multiple models. Behav. Brain Sci. 27, 572–579 (2004).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  47. McNamara, R. A., Willard, A. K., Norenzayan, A. & Henrich, J. Weighing outcome vs. intent across societies: how cultural models of mind shape moral reasoning. Cognition 182, 95–108 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  48. Barrett, H. C. et al. Small-scale societies exhibit fundamental variation in the role of intentions in moral judgment. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 113, 4688–4693 (2016).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  49. Small, D. A. & Simonsohn, U. Friends of victims: personal experience and prosocial behavior. J. Consum. Res. 35, 532–542 (2008).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  50. DeScioli, P., Bruening, R. & Kurzban, R. The omission effect in moral cognition: toward a functional explanation. Evol. Hum. Behav. 32, 204–215 (2011).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  51. Dana, J., Weber, R. A. & Kuang, J. X. Exploiting moral wiggle room: experiments demonstrating an illusory preference for fairness. Econ. Theory 33, 67–80 (2007).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  52. Andreoni, J., Rao, J. M. & Trachtman, H. Avoiding the Ask: A Field Experiment on Altruism, Empathy, and Charitable Giving Report No. w17648 (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2011).

  53. Dana, J., Cain, D. M. & Dawes, R. M. What you don’t know won’t hurt me: costly (but quiet) exit in dictator games. Organ. Behav. Hum. Decis. Process. 100, 193–201 (2006).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  54. Trivers, R. L. The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Q. Rev. Biol. 46, 35–57 (1971).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  55. Weber, E. U. et al. Asymmetric discounting in intertemporal choice: a query-theory account. Psychol. Sci. 18, 516–523 (2007).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We thank E. Yoeli, A. Bear, M. Singh, J. Jordan and P. DeScioli for their feedback on this manuscript; N. Baloch, Y. Mehra Bardoloi, K. Barolak, B, Davis, O. Lala and H. Mullins for their help in calculating and awarding the bonuses; S. Ryan, A. Viser, E. Wilson and P. Choi for their help in formatting the manuscript and editing the figures; and the John Templeton Foundation for financial support. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Bethany Burum

  2. Department of Mathematics, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Martin A. Nowak

  3. Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Moshe Hoffman

Authors
  1. Bethany Burum
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Martin A. Nowak
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Moshe Hoffman
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

All authors edited the manuscript and approved the final version. B.B. and M.H. designed the studies and wrote the manuscript, in consultation with M.N. B.B. collected and analysed the data. The study designs were based on theory developed by M.H.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bethany Burum.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Peer review information Primary handling editor: Charlotte Payne.

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary information

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Burum, B., Nowak, M.A. & Hoffman, M. An evolutionary explanation for ineffective altruism. Nat Hum Behav 4, 1245–1257 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-00950-4

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-00950-4

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing