ARE you selfish or generous? Or do you follow the herd, always giving whatever the majority of people deem appropriate?
Society is a mixture of these three types of character, but most of us are the last type, altering our generosity to fit the societal norm, new research has found. It suggests that governments could prompt huge swathes of the population to become more charitable simply by giving more itself or by providing other benevolent role models.
Robert Kurzban of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Daniel Houser of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, asked volunteers to trade tokens during a series of games. Players could split their tokens between private funds, which reaped fixed rewards, and a group fund, in which the rewards differed depending on the total invested.
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After each round of trading, the players were told what other participants were doing, and given a chance to alter their own strategy.
Of 84 participants, 17 remained implacably selfish and refused to invest in a common fund. Eleven were unconditionally generous, always making large contributions. But 53 altered their contributions to match what they saw as the societal norm (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/ pnas.0408759102). Three participants could not be defined. Ironically, says Kurzban, the outcome was that everyone ended up with the same profit, however munificent or mean they were.
