(Illustration by Ben Wiseman)
Does a good deed count as truly “good” if doing it makes you feel better? Can an act be genuinely “altruistic” if it’s not purely selfless? Philosophers have debated that question ever since the time of Plato. Now a team of researchers has undertaken an empirical study of that existential quandary. The question that they investigate puts a slight twist on the age-old philosophical problem: If a good deed yields positive emotional benefits for the person who does it, does our awareness of those benefits alter our perception of that person’s moral character?
Deborah A. Small, associate professor of marketing and psychology at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, says that benefiting from altruism does have a “signal value” that affects how others view an altruistic act. She and her fellow researchers make a distinction between emotional benefits (the positive feelings that arise from doing a good deed) and material or reputational benefits (receiving a tax break, say, or a flurry of Facebook “likes”). “Emotional benefits are viewed very differently from other types of benefits,” says Small. “In fact, the other types of benefits lead to a discounting of altruism, whereas emotional benefits are seen as part and parcel of what altruism is.” So the more emotion that a person brings to a benevolent act, the more “moral” others will deem that person to be—a finding that contradicts the common view that altruism is entirely selfless.
The researchers also studied whether different emotions send different signals about altruistic behavior. Do people, for instance, view empathy as a more positive signal than they do distress? Yes, says Small, but that doesn’t mean that they regard distress as a negative signal. On the contrary, the more distress that a person feels, the more likely other people are to view that person as moral. “[People think] that empathy is more generous than distress, but they aren’t opposites in the way that altruism and selfishness are opposites,” Small explains. “If you’re distressed, you’re probably empathic, and if you’re empathic, you’re probably also distressed. So both [of those emotional states] are positive signals.”
To investigate this set of issues, Small and her colleagues conducted a series of six experiments. The research team recruited participants via Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online task service, and presented them with various scenarios. In one scenario, participants had to evaluate the actions of a person who, while reading an article online about hungry families in his community, was given the option to donate money to a local soup kitchen. The researchers told participants that the person would receive some kind of benefit if he made a donation. When the promised benefit was material or reputational, participants said that they would view the person as more moral if he did not expect it than if he did expect it. But when the benefit was emotional, the opposite was true: Participants attributed a higher moral character to him if he anticipated receiving such a benefit than if he did not anticipate it.
David G. Rand, an assistant professor of psychology, economics, and management at Yale University, suggests that the researchers’ findings highlight the role that positive emotions play in motivating people to help one another. “If you’re emotionally engaged with giving, you are more willing to give, no matter what. But if you are giving only for some kind of reputational or material benefit, then whether you give in the future totally depends on the situation and whether there are material benefits to be had,” he says. “You’re only a conditional helper.”
Alixandra Barasch, Emma E. Levine, Jonathan Z. Berman, and Deborah A. Small, “Selfish or Selfless? On the Signal Value of Emotion in Altruistic Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 107, September 2014.
Read more stories by Adrienne Day.