Selfless giving

Highlights

• We find that people who anticipate more personal change over time give more to others.

• This influence on generosity is shown to be distinct from several other influences.

• This paper tests not only the import of connection with the future self but also connection with others.

• When more overlap is perceived with others than with the future self, people share more with others.

• Three incentive-compatible studies find a relation between personal change and actual charitable giving.

Abstract

In four studies, we show that people who anticipate more personal change over time give more to others. We measure and manipulate participants’ beliefs in the persistence of the defining psychological features of a person (e.g., his or her beliefs, values, and life goals) and measure generosity, finding support for the hypothesis in three studies using incentive-compatible charitable donation decisions and one involving hypothetical choices about sharing with loved ones.

Introduction

Imagine deciding whether to give some future income to a charity. Many factors might influence your decision: your anticipated income, your anticipated needs, the value you place on the charity. But is your decision also influenced by how you think about the nature of the self? In particular, is your decision affected by the extent to which you think your future self will be the same person as your current self? Philosophers from different traditions have suggested that considerations about the persistence of the self should impact your generosity to others (Collins, 1982, Goodman, 2002, Parfit, 1984). In this article we examine whether generosity is actually affected by how people think about the persistence of the self.

Generosity is often studied in the context of self-interest models of rational behavior. Much human behavior can be understood as rational attempts to maximize self-interest. People choose more rather than less of things that they desire, like money; they choose less rather than more of things they don’t want, like pain. These decisions are naturally understood as seeking to maximize what the agent wants for herself—her self-regarding desires. A self-interest model also explains many morally problematic behaviors. Self-interested behavior likely contributes to global problems like pollution and overpopulation (Hardin, 1968). On a less grand scale, self-interest also explains observed patterns of allocations in economic games (Camerer, 2003). In these cases, people allocate more of a shared resource (usually money) to themselves, presumably because they care more about their own interests than they do about the interests of the other person. Ironically, self-interest models have also been used to explain prosocial behaviors, like generosity. For example, charitable giving has been explained in terms of self-interest by factoring in the rewarding “warm glow” response often associated with pro-social behavior (Andreoni, 1990). Despite a wealth of work on self-interest in psychology and economics, there is little work on the role of the self in self-interest. Is it possible to make people less self-interested by getting them to think differently about the self?

There is considerable variance in the views people have about the extent to which the self changes over time. In particular, people have different views about the degree of connectedness – the persistence of memories, convictions, values, ambitions, etc.—between one’s current and future self. Prior research shows that how people think about connectedness between the current and future self affects economic decisions that involve tradeoffs between the current and future self (Bartels and Rips, 2010, Ersner-Hershfield et al., 2009). Our studies explore whether people will be more generous to others as a function of how connected they feel to the person they will be in a year.

According to a prominent line of thought in philosophical ethics, if one judges one’s current self to be only weakly connected to one’s future self, this should make one assign less weight to the interests of one’s future self; consequently the interests of others should take on a relatively higher weight in one’s decision making. The idea here has roots in the Buddhist idea that there is no soul-like self (Harvey 2000), but the most influential contemporary development of these ideas comes from Derek Parfit. Parfit maintains that because there is no soul-like self, the continuity of self is a matter of degree of connectedness (1973, p. 140). One’s current connections to the present self are a kind of limit case—the connections are maximal (1973, p. 147). But as time passes, those connections become weaker, and as one contemplates a distant future self, one is contemplating a person with weak connectedness to the current self.

Parfit maintains that coming to believe that the self changes across time led him to become more concerned about the welfare of other people: “There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life and more concerned about the lives of others” (1984). Further, if what really matters to us are psychological characteristics, then we might find that generosity to others will be a function not just of how connected one feels to one’s future self but also of the extent to which one judges the potential recipient as psychologically overlapping with one’s present self.¹

Of course, it is far from clear that people will react to beliefs about the mutability of self in the ways suggested by philosophers. In the first place, what philosophers claim is that the normatively correct reaction to coming to believe in the mutability of self is to have greater concern for others. When we turn to predicting behavior, it is obviously a substantive assumption that people will behave in normatively appropriate ways in interpersonal interactions. After all, there is considerable evidence for self-serving biases in interpersonal judgment and decision making (e.g. Greenberg, 1983, Loewenstein et al., 1993, Messick and Sentis, 1979, Ross and Sicoly, 1979). Moreover, even if I think that the connection between my current and future self is attenuated, I might think that my connection to my future self still dwarfs my connection to any other person. Thinking about others might make especially salient the myriad differences between others and myself, and this might counteract any inclination to greater generosity. Thus, it’s essential to investigate whether people really do react in interpersonal contexts as predicted by normative models of the role of connectedness in self-interest. Furthermore, given the social significance of charitable giving, it is important to explore the extent to which beliefs about connectedness impact behavior in that domain. Although there is an extensive literature on charitable giving (e.g., Andreoni, 2001, Bekkers and Wiepking, 2007, Oppenheimer and Olivola, 2010), there has been no work on how beliefs about the persistence of the self might affect charitable behavior.