WE must be really good people. By the end of last week, American charities had raised more than $1.4 billion to help survivors of Hurricane Katrina, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy. The Red Cross said that it alone had received more than $1 billion in pledges and donations.
Jarrid Horn, 10, of York, Pa., helped in the hurricane relief effort.
But are we really as selfless as all that? Is our willingness to deprive ourselves to give money to an anonymous refugee simply driven by a disinterested desire to do good? Biologists, psychologists and economists who have studied such acts of goodness say there is more to altruistic behavior than meets the eye.
For one, altruism isn't an exclusively human trait. Vampire bats are pretty altruistic, too, regurgitating blood for members of the group that haven't eaten. Sterile worker bees, which are incapable of conscious thought, let alone moral behavior, are about as altruistic as a living creature can be: they give their lives so their queen may reproduce.
And the altruistic impulse in humans is frequently absent in the face of need, which seems inconsistent with selfless goodness. Why does the generosity sparked by events like Katrina fail to appear when it comes to helping the 700,000 African children who die from diarrhea every year for lack of clean water?
Kathleen D. McCarthy, director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at the City University of New York, argued that Americans' response to Katrina had much to do with what she calls the "but for the grace of God factor." The devastation hit so close to home that they could imagine their own living rooms under water. It's harder for them to put themselves in the place of a dying African child.
The impulse toward goodness, in fact, varies according to circumstance. In an experiment by economists at the University of Chicago, the University of Maryland, the University of Nevada at Reno and East Carolina University, residents of Pitt County, N. C., were asked to contribute to a center to study natural-hazard mitigation, as a response to the devastation caused by Hurricanes Dennis and Floyd in eastern North Carolina.
Economists found, unsurprisingly, that people were much more likely to contribute when their donations entered them into a lottery in which they could win several hundred dollars. But they also found that contributions of white men rose by a similar rate when beautiful white women were asking for money.
In most altruistic acts, there is something in it for the giver. "At one level, altruism has a selfish component to it," said the economist Gary Becker, a pioneer in the analysis of altruistic giving.
People get several things from acting altruistically. There's the enlightened self-interest: the needy may feel they are more likely to receive help when they themselves are in trouble. Then there's the inner glow that comes from acting according to one's ideals: be it giving to needy children or to church on Sunday. Having a good deed made known also has its glory, as well as avoiding the stigma of not contributing when everyone else in the congregation, alumni association or social club has.
These factors help explain why typically fewer than 1 percent of contributors to a given cause are anonymous, researchers say, or why people love to lug their stuff around in tote bags with the logo of their public radio station. Corporations virtually never give without trumpeting the act in a news release.
The selfishness may just be part of our wiring. Biologists were long stumped by altruism in animals because it didn't seem to make evolutionary sense. Creatures like the altruistic vampire bat, it was theorized, would eventually be wiped out of the gene pool because forgoing consumption to aid a fellow in need would reduce their own chance of survival and reproduction. This would leave only selfish bats.
But biologists have found that this only appears to be a paradox. They observed that altruistic animals tend to be more helpful with their own family or clan, which have a higher chance of sharing these altruistic genes. Researchers also found that altruistic animals engage in tit-for-tat strategies: generous to those who are generous back, but withholding from the selfish.
And, of course, the altruists are usually accompanied by those who prey on them. For example, as Americans reached for their pocketbooks to help hurricane victims, scam artists started phony Web sites to take their money. The thieves were behaving like the cuckoo, which leaves its eggs in the nests of other birds. When the cuckoo chick hatches, it throws the other eggs and chicks out of the nest, and the host parent - hard-wired to care for chicks - unknowingly raises the intruder.
