Mind Your Heart: Irrationally Giving
You see a drowning child in a shallow pond while walking past it. Instinctively, you wade in and pull the child out. Your clothes have spoiled from the rescue. This cost may be insignificant to you, yet life-saving for the child
Peter Singer, a moral philosopher, uses this thought experiment to make a cogent argument. We ought to prevent bad things from happening, if we have the power to do so without sacrificing something of comparable moral importance. As we know, donations to credible charities definitively help prevent avoidable death and suffering. Logically then, we acquire the moral obligation to contribute because the philanthropic cost is insignificant to our standards of living. Although this argument seems shrewd and sober, it does not coincide with the way donors’ make decisions about their charitable giving. Several neuroeconomic findings reveal the importance of emotional underpinnings in charitable giving.
References
Greene, J. D. (2007). The secret joke of Kant’s soul. Moral psychology: Historical and contemporary readings, 359-372.
Greene, J. D., Sommerville, R. B., Nystrom, L. E., Darley, J. M., & Cohen, J. D. (2001). An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science, 293(5537), 2105-2108.
Koenigs, M., Young, L., Adolphs, R., Tranel, D., Cushman, F., Hauser, M., & Damasio, A. (2007). Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral judgements. Nature, 446(7138), 908-911.
Kogut, T., & Ritov, I. (2005). The “identified victim” effect: An identified group, or just a single individual?. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 18(3), 157-167.
Small, D. A., Loewenstein, G., & Slovic, P. (2007). Sympathy and callousness: The impact of deliberative thought on donations to identifiable and statistical victims. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 102(2), 143-153.
About the Author
Arash Sharma
Arash is a Behavioural Scientist at the Government of Canada.
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