The sinister side of generosity

Let’s play a game! First, I’ll give you an envelope which was left by the previous player. The previous player was given $6 and told to keep as much, or as little as they like, but to leave the rest in the envelope for you. I’ll then give you another $6 – you can take as much as you like, but you must put the rest in another envelope for the following player. Thus the game consists of a long chain of players who first act as a receiver, opening an envelope to find some money, and then as a splitter, sharing money between themselves and the following player.  

How do you think you would play this game? Would you keep all of the money for yourself, knowing that you’ll never meet any of the other players in the game? Or maybe you’d split it fairly evenly, considering the previous player left some money for you? 

That’s what a recent paper in the Journal of experimental psychology (Gray, Ward, & Norton, 2012) has investigated. They wanted to know if the amount of money left in the envelope (which was actually controlled by the experimenter) had any effect on the amount that people would pay forward to the next ‘player’ (again the experimenter). The technical name of the phenomenon they were investigating is generalised reciprocity - the pro-social behaviour of helping others after having been helped by someone else, aka ‘paying it forward’.

The researchers found that when the previous player acted greedily, i.e. the participant’s envelope was left without any money; they also acted greedily towards the following player. However, if their envelope contained $3, a fair and equitable amount, they tended to also pay forward fair and equal amounts ($3.38 on average). The surprising finding occurred when participants received a very generous amount of $6. When the participants believed they were receiving $6 from the previous player, they would not pay forward the same level of generosity; they paid forward no more than those who had received a fair split.

This highlights the sinister side of generosity – greed propagates more than generosity. The amount of generosity passed on in a chain of good behaviours dissipates with each step, whereas greed is paid forward in equal measure at every stage. Therefore, the authors suggest that if you want to create a chain of kind acts like in the story “pay it forward”, people should focus on treating others equally and fairly, rather than giving over the top random acts of kindness.

The authors gave a bit of context to their findings, by providing a real world example of this phenomenon:

 “The person who awakes to gratefully find his long driveway cleared of snow may feel that he has paid forward the generous act by brushing off a bit of snow from a nearby car, but this discount rate is sufficiently high that the perpetuation of goodwill likely ends there. On the other hand, the person who awakes to find his driveway completely blocked from an errant snowplough may pile all that extra snow onto another car, thereby creating a significantly longer chain of ill will.”

However, there is something good to be said of human nature from this study. The game in their experiment was played completely anonymously, yet people still acted fairly, and somewhat generously. This was unexpected considering the current understanding of generalised reciprocity. It was previously believed that people only pay forward kind acts when the recipients are in the same community, are known by the giver, or are genetically related to them, yet this does not seem to be the case.

References

Gray, K., Ward, A. F., & Norton, M. I. (2012). Paying it forward: Generalized reciprocity and the limits of generocity. Journal f experimental Psychology: General, 17, 1-8.