Virtue on Display
The Hidden Motives Behind Giving, Learning, Healing, and Voting
*This is Part 3 in a series on The Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson*
Read Part 1 here:
Read Par 2 here:
Why do we donate to charity? Is it because we are good people trying to help others? If someone asks you that, I will bet that is the answer any sane person would give. But is it really true? Or is there some deeper reason why?
In part 3 of this series, we’ll continue to explore domains of life where our true motives are hidden, even from ourselves. Domains such as charitable giving, education, medicine, and politics.
If we truly cared about charity impact, you would expect the most effective charity to be receiving the most money. Here is a thought to consider on your own giving, do you ever research these charities before you donate? How else would you expect to know how effective they will be at deploying your money towards a cause that you seem to care about. Only about 35% of givers actually look into the charity that they are donating to. So we seem to care very little about making an impact, why else would we give?
The act of donating makes us feel good, regardless of whether anything actually changes because of it. Not only that, but we want to be seen as people who are generous. It explains best why truly giving anonymously is so rare. We want people to see and know that not only do we care about other people, but we have enough resources that we are able to give some away and still enough to provide for our family.
Think about your own decisions. If nobody would ever know that you are giving money away, would you still do it?
If we asked a similar question about education, would you rather just get the degree with no learning or learn everything but not get a degree, what do you think you would say? Answering with just a degree would clearly show that you don’t value anything that you would actually learn in college. You would be attending college simply to get the piece of paper at the end that you completed your tour of duty. The point of college then would just be to get a job at the end.
That is really what education has come to. It is a way for students to show off their ability to get through 4 ( or more ) years of school by being on time with assignments, attending class, or not doing anything dumb enough to get you kicked out. All things values by potential employers. College becomes a way for students to display their attractive qualities to any interested employer.
A similar phenomenon can be seen inside of health care, in that we would rather have the appearance of being healthy, taking complicated medicine routines or seeing a doctor for any minor issue, than actually being healthy. The authors term it conspicuous caring. Medicine becomes a caring signal, for either how much you care for yourself or how much you care for others. By coming to the aid of a friend in need, you signal that you can be relied up to give support when needed in the hope that if the roles were reversed, the other person would return the favor.
Economists have found that when they compare different socioeconomic conditions, when your neighbors spend more on health care, you are likely to do the same. It makes little sense if you only care about your health. Nothing changed besides how much money you made, yet you will find yourself paying more. The obvious retort is that you would now have more disposable income to really take care of yourself. If that were true, we would expect to find that richer people or even wealthier countries would have better health. Which they do not.
So where does all the money go to then? Medication. Nobody will pay more to see a doctor who tells them to eat healthy, exercise more, and get enough sleep. That is too obvious and that advice is free, although it has proven to be more effective than most medication. If health was your main concern, you would be eating salad and running every day.
Politics functions much the same way. If we all truly cared about the issues, one would expect voters to be informed on how these issues would affect their lives or even how the current government runs. When asked about how much the US spends on foreign aid, voters consistently gave answers around 10% of the budget, some as high as 25%. The answer is .6%. It can even be easy to trick voters into giving different answers to the same policy question weeks apart. It's not that the changed their opinion, they just forgot the answer they initially gave.
Even look at the actual voting process itself. Realistically, our votes don’t matter. Especially if you don’t live in a swing state. Voting Democrat in New York does almost nothing to affect the general election. But we all love to get the "I Voted Today" sticker to proudly wear around for the rest of the day. Like most of Elephants in the Brain, politics is another way that we signal to other people where we stand and that we can be loyal. Loyal to our political party or even to our local community. After all, you can't get credit for something that other people don’t know that you did.
Now that we have finished dissecting all the many situations in life where we deceive ourselves, we are left with the question of what do we do now that we know this. It is a tough question because after all we do this for a reason. Hiding the true motives from ourselves gives us a chance to pursue more selfish motives without bearing the guilt of knowing that’s why we donate money, vote, or are going to school. But there are upsides to this information.
Awareness is the first step in dealing with anything in life. Now that we are aware of the elephants in our brains, we can more easily spot it in other people and, more importantly, we can see it in ourselves. Next time we have a work conflict, we can recognize that we are really mad about the competition and looking weak rather than the other person. Next time we see sometime post their political views, we can recognize they are simply signaling to others that they care or are a part of team. We can begin to see each other more as human beings.
Hopefully now we can be less critical of other people with their selfish acts, knowing all the while that we do the same thing.