I’ve often thought that charitable motivations were one, or more, of the following:
- Religious motivations. We give because God (or, more precisely, some guy who claims to have a special relationship with God) tells us to give.
- Indirect gain motivations. We perceive a shortcoming in society, and by donating we believe we’ll help shore up the hole in the dike.
- Reputational motivations. We give because it makes us look good to society at large, and then we reap the direct gains of looking charitable.
This article in Nautilus then attempts to explain the phenomenon of anonymous giving in the context of the third motivation, the reputational motivations category. Here’s a small bit from it, in the context of an episode from a TV series with which I’m not familiar, so I apologize for not expanding the context:
What’s intriguing about anonymous giving, and other behaviors apparently designed to obscure good traits and acts, like modesty, is that it’s “hard to reconcile with standard evolutionary accounts of pro-social behavior,” the researchers write. Donations fall under a form of cooperation called “indirect reciprocity.” “Direct reciprocity is like a barter economy based on the immediate exchange of goods, while indirect reciprocity resembles the invention of money,” Nowak wrote in his highly cited 2006 paper “Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation.” “The money that fuels the engines of indirect reciprocity is reputation.” Donation evolved, in other words, because it granted a good reputation, which helped humans in securing mates and cementing alliances. But if that’s true, how did the practice of anonymous giving arise? The title of the new paper suggests a solution: “The signal-burying game can explain why we obscure positive traits and good deeds.”
The signal-burying game is one of the latest examples of scientists gaining insight into human behavior from game theoretic models and signalling theory. These games, the authors write, make sense of “seemingly counterintuitive behaviors by carefully analyzing which information these behaviors convey in a given context.” Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, said recently on Sam Harris’ podcast, “Waking Up,” “Signalling theory is probably the part of game theory I use most often. The idea there is: How do you credibly demonstrate what kind of organism you are through the signals you give out? And what makes those signals honest, and hard to fake, rather than easily faked, like cheap talk?”
The article is, of course, pop-science, which means they aren’t being properly general in their discussion. The impression I gain from the article is that the authors have accepted that everything is done for selfish reasons (libertarians would love that), and they’re attempting to rationalize anonymous giving, one of the potholes in their road to the compleat explanation of human behavior, by saying it doesn’t exist.
But of course it exists. While some might argue this is a self-negating statement, when I give I would give just as much anonymously as I do with my name attached – the latter is what happens because I mainly give by credit card, and since the government currently lets me take them against my taxes, I do that, too.
But while the latter is a well-known example of social-engineering, it doesn’t qualify to negate anonymous giving.
While I don’t doubt that some folks do engage in the behavior of interest in the article, which is “anonymous giving which is then leaked,” this is unsurprising in a culture where we also find rare, but documented, cases of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. The intellectual error in this article may be to fail to recognize there are non-biological as well as biological evolutionary reasons for behaviors. Rather than attempt to deny that anonymous giving occurs, it makes more sense to ask how it fits into the various categorizations of motivations for giving; we can use the categories I gave, above, or come up with your own.
In the first category, religious motivations, we have the most arbitrary and capricious reasons for immediate motivations, but they all boil down to God said be anonymous. This is the introduction of social evolutionary pressure which I mentioned, because it measures conformance, or lack thereto, of social strictures. The signaling mechanism indicating conformance might be the swelling of the coffers of the charity, singular or plural, in question, or the lack of apparently wealth of the donors. Just a trifle ironically, the various forms and reasons of anonymous giving are subject to the forces of social evolution; that is, those forms which lead to negative consequences for the members of the religion in question will become dead ends, while those leading to positive results will be propagated. This is an elementary observation. It’s simple to realize that there must be a congruency between positive for members of the religion and for the greater society in which it is partially or totally embedded, otherwise society will extinguish the particular phenomenon – or be extinguished.
In the second category, indirect gain motivations, anonymity may or may not serve the ultimate goal the betterment of society. However, I will point out that there are reasons for not advertising that one has the resources to contribute large amounts of wealth to a particular cause, such as importuning from other causes, worthy or, more often, not worthy. Then there’s outright criminal behaviors with negative impacts on the giver. This may be the strongest case for anonymous giving that I can think of – improving society, with it consequent positive results for the giver and their family relations, without signaling that one has wealth which may be gained by malefactors through negative acts. It makes anonymous giving seems like a more rational course of behavior than reputational giving, at least in relation to the perception of potential criminality in the society at large.
This, too, is a matter of social evolutionary pressure, especially if those who do not anonymous give are then eliminated from the idea pool. The idea pool is analogous to the gene pool, and consists of those ideas which are used to improve society. If we admit that those with more wealth are often those who most control the direction in which society will travel, then those victimized by criminals will lose that influence – and society will lose those ideas, for better or for worse.
And then there’s folks, like myself, who have no taste for gaudy & pretentious gestures. Not usually. I’m not as shy as when I was young, but I’m still not much for the limelight.
In any case, I’d take this article with more than a grain of salt.
