The Fear Factor Read online

  4. Key cultural changes have made us more caring.

  So if it’s not self-control that is leading to more caring and compassion in the world, what could it be? Another possibility is that a much more general change—one that has also been indirectly promoted by the rise of state governments quelling violence and promoting trade—is responsible: an increase in quality of life. People act better when they are themselves doing better.

  The last millennium has been a period of extraordinary improvements in human prosperity, health, and well-being around the world. It’s not just deaths and suffering from violence that have decreased during this period—it’s deaths and suffering from all causes, including famine, injury, and disease. Global hunger has precipitously declined. Life expectancies have more than doubled over the last 200 years. Near-miraculous advances in medicine have eradicated horrifying diseases, like smallpox, plague, polio, and measles, that once ravaged millions of people around the world. Do you know what scarlet fever is? I don’t, and neither do you, probably. But as recently as 150 years ago, epidemics of it killed tens of thousands of children every year—sometimes every child in a family in just a week or two. Two of Darwin’s children were killed by it, as was John D. Rockefeller’s grandson. It’s one of dozens of former scourges that are now all but gone. Only fifty years ago, one child of every five born around the world died before their fifth birthday. The rate is now less than one in twenty-five. It is easy to miss the significance of these changes because they have been so gradual and consistent. But the amount of human suffering and misery that has been alleviated in the last century is, in reality, staggering.

  Education rates also continue to improve worldwide. Literacy was near 0 percent essentially everywhere in the world 500 years ago. As recently as 1980, barely half of the world’s population could read. But the global literacy rate is now around 85 percent, and across broad swaths of the world it is close to 100 percent, thanks in part to tremendous strides made in public schooling and in providing equal educational opportunities for boys and girls.

  Wealth is increasing at astonishing rates as well. The economic historian Joel Mokyr has observed that in modern industrialized nations, middle-class families enjoy higher standards of living than emperors or popes did just a few centuries ago. The unequal distribution of wealth remains a serious concern, but the poor are also better off than they used to be. The proportion of people living in abject poverty continues to fall all over the world, dropping from around 90 percent of the global population in 1820 to just under 10 percent today. The World Bank estimates that in just the three-year span from 2012 to 2015, the number of people living in extreme poverty (defined as living on less than $1.90 per day) dropped by 200 million, bringing the percentage of people living in extreme poverty to below 10 percent of the global population for the first time. That is a remarkable amount of progress in a very short time. World Bank president Jim Yong Kim called it “the best story in the world today.”

  There is every reason to believe that these increases in prosperity and quality of life have been the source of many other positive downstream effects—which include ongoing positive trends in generosity and altruism toward strangers, up to and including extraordinary altruism. That well-being has increased worldwide in tandem with various forms of generosity and altruism toward strangers is clear, although obviously this is merely a correlation, and a wildly confounded one at that. But my lab and others have conducted more targeted research showing that, even after controlling for many possible confounds, increasing levels of well-being are associated with increased altruism.

  A few years ago, my student Kristin Brethel-Haurwitz and I were combing through national statistics on altruistic kidney donation when we noticed the incredible variation in rates of donation across the fifty US states. We wondered why this might be. Around the same time, the Gallup polling organization came out with its first-ever statistics on variations in well-being across the states. When we compared maps of altruistic kidney donations and well-being side by side, the similarities were striking. We ran a number of analyses to probe these similarities and found that even after we controlled for every difference we could possibly think of across the states—median income, health metrics, inequality, education, racial composition, and religiosity, to name a few—high well-being in a state remained a strong predictor of altruistic kidney donations.

  Well-being is more than just happiness—it’s life satisfaction, having a sense of meaning and purpose, and being able to meet basic needs. These are qualities shared by denizens of well-off states like Utah, Minnesota, and New Hampshire, which, though very different in some ways, all produce high proportions of altruistic kidney donors. In states like Mississippi, Arkansas, and West Virginia, on the other hand, both well-being and altruistic donations are very low. Kristin and I also found that although well-being is somewhat related to baseline variables like income and health, it’s even more strongly related to whether these indicators are improving. We found that, even after controlling for baseline income and health, increases in median income and health over a ten-year period were strong predictors of both well-being and extraordinary altruism.

  Across the fifty US states, rates of altruistic kidney donation rise in tandem with well-being. Abigail Marsh and Kristin Brethel-Haurwitz.

  In some ways we found this result surprising. It’s a common trope—embodied by super-wealthy fictional characters from Ebenezer Scrooge to Gordon Gekko to the Malfoys—that wealth and status lead to selfishness. But these tropes are not really relevant to our findings. “Wealth” in large population studies like the one we conducted doesn’t refer to people with butlers and mansions. The super-wealthy represent only a tiny fraction of the population, and their actions aren’t reflected in our data set. Instead, our findings suggest that incremental increases in objective and subjective well-being across large groups of people also increase altruism. As people move out of poverty and into the middle class, or inch from below the median income to above it, the odds that they will opt to give a kidney to a stranger fractionally increase. This says more about possible benefits of financial security and reductions in poverty than it does about stereotypical wealthy people.

  Our findings are consistent with a large body of literature linking generosity to well-being. The psychologists Elizabeth Dunn and Mike Norton, as well as others, have conducted experimental and population-level studies that consistently find a positive relationship between well-being and various forms of generosity, such that people who report higher well-being, or whose well-being is experimentally tweaked, tend to behave more generously. This is in keeping with the theory that flourishing promotes engagement in a variety of voluntary, beneficent activities. Our findings on kidney donations support this theory, as do a wide array of studies that have linked objective measures of well-being, including wealth, health, and education, to everyday generosity and altruism. One 2005 Gallup poll found a linear relationship between income and volunteering, donating money (of any amount), and donating blood. Individuals in households earning more than $75,000 per year were the most likely to engage in all three behaviors, followed by those living in households earning more than $30,000 per year, then by households earning less than that amount. (Keep in mind, of course, that such studies tell us about population averages rather than the behavior of any one individual; plenty of less-well-off households are generous, and plenty of wealthier ones are not.) Another large study found similar results in Canadians: the best predictors of charitable donations, volunteering, and civic participation included higher income and more education. Large-scale naturalistic experiments reveal similar patterns. A field experiment in Ireland found that socioeconomic status was the best predictor of donations to a child welfare charity and of altruism. In a “lost letter” paradigm (first created by Stanley Milgram, incidentally), stamped letters addressed to charitable organizations were left on the ground for passersby who were so inclined to pick up and deposit in a mailbox. As in s
imilar previous studies in the United States and England, letters dropped in more deprived neighborhoods were less likely to be returned than letters dropped in less deprived neighborhoods. The positive relationship between well-being and altruism persists across cultures, from Taiwan to Namibia.

  One reason for these patterns may be that lower levels of well-being that follow from financial insecurity, poor health, or traumatic life events inhibit altruism by souring people’s view of the world, human nature included. Many decades of research on misanthropy find that this trait, which reflects cynical attitudes about human nature and lack of faith in other people, is inversely related to most indicators of well-being. People who are experiencing hard times are much more likely to report dour views of others, such as that others are only looking out for themselves and cannot be trusted. This suggests that, among the many positive sequellae of being wealthier (again, in the less-poor sense, not in the mansions-and-butlers sense), healthier, and enjoying higher social status appears to be a greater tendency to view others as generally trustworthy, kind, and generous.

  To be fair, some recent studies conducted by psychology researchers whom I greatly respect have found conflicting results. For example, a study conducted by the psychologists Paul Piff, Dacher Keltner, and their colleagues found that people who drive luxury cars (who also tend to be wealthier) were less likely than other drivers to follow traffic laws and norms like yielding at a four-way stop or at a pedestrian crossing. In other studies, undergraduate students at the University of California–Berkeley who placed themselves higher on a ladder representing their overall standing in the community were less likely to share resources with strangers in a computer-based economic game. Parallel results were obtained using a national sample of adults from an email list maintained by a private West Coast university; of these adults, the wealthier and more educated ones were less generous in a computerized task. And in a sample of adults recruited from Craigslist, those who reported their social status to be higher were more likely to cheat in an online game of chance.

  I myself was quite torn about these divergent sets of findings, being just as familiar with the trope that wealth promotes selfishness as everyone else. Then I encountered the biggest, most ambitious, and best-controlled study conducted on this topic yet, the results of which were so clear and so consistent that they convinced me that being better off may—again, on average—actually increase a wide variety of caring behaviors toward strangers. The study was conducted by the German psychologist Martin Korndörfer and his colleagues, who were familiar with the thinking that wealth and status tend to promote selfishness. So they conducted eight large studies that aimed to examine the association in large samples. And I mean really large: their studies included upwards of 37,000 people. Importantly, these were also representative samples, which capture the behavior of an entire population, not just selective subsets of it. All else being equal, findings from larger and more representative samples are more likely to be accurate than findings from smaller, more selective samples.

  The researchers were surprised to find the opposite of what they had expected. They started off looking at charitable donations in their native Germany and found that, as wealth and education and status rise, Germans donate proportionally more of their income to charity, not less, and that the proportion of households that donate increases as well, from around one-quarter of the poorest 10 percent of households to three-quarters of the wealthiest 10 percent. They next looked at Americans’ charitable donations and found exactly the same effects. They found similar patterns again for volunteering—wealthier, higher-status Germans and Americans were more likely to volunteer to help others, and they volunteered more frequently. Reinforcing the idea that “wealthier” in these studies is not referring to the super-wealthy, the researchers found that generosity increased consistently with wealth along the entire income spectrum, from the very poor to the slightly less poor to the middle class to the wealthiest, who were still nowhere near super-wealthy. (In the United States, the top 10 percent of households earn around $160,000 or more per year, which is well-off, to be sure, but hardly super-wealthy.)

  The researchers also looked at everyday helping behaviors in large, representative US samples—behaviors like carrying a stranger’s belongings, or letting them go ahead of you in line, the forms of altruism that are most likely to be spontaneous reactions to another person’s need—as well as behavior in a controlled economic game in which resources could be freely given to a stranger. The pattern was always the same. Those who were relatively better off were more likely to give. Finally, consistent with the literature on misanthropy, the economic game also showed that wealthier and higher-status players were not only more trustworthy (giving more resources to the other player) but more trusting as well.

  These findings contradict the possibility that wealth and status are correlated with generosity only because poorer, lower-status households have fewer resources to give away. If it were only the case that poor households donate less money than wealthier ones, this explanation would make sense. But the fact that both the proportion of income donated and the likelihood of donating anything at all continue to rise with every incremental increase in wealth and status does not fit as well with this explanation. Surely most middle-class families have at least some resources they could donate—but the likelihood that they will donate anything rather than nothing increases at every point along the spectrum of wealth and status. So too does the likelihood that they will volunteer their time, despite the fact that wealthier individuals generally have less leisure time, not more. Moreover, there is no clear reason why poverty would impede everyday helping behaviors like giving directions or helping someone carry their belongings.

  Could these patterns be somehow unique to Germany and the United States? It appears not. When the researchers examined patterns of volunteering in twenty-eight other nations across five continents, they found identical results in twenty-two of them (interestingly, exceptions included states with strong social welfare systems, like France, Norway, and Sweden, where volunteering was roughly equal across incomes), and in no country was increased wealth associated with less generosity.

  Americans’ likelihood of volunteering and making charitable donations as a function of objective social class (calculated based on income, education, and occupational prestige). M. Korndörfer, B. Egloff, and S. C. Schmukle. “A Large Scale Test of the Effect of Social Class on Prosocial Behavior.” PLoS One 10, no. 7 (2015): e0133193.

  All in all, the data are overwhelmingly clear. Studies that draw from large, unbiased population samples all show the same effects: those who are relatively more prosperous are more likely to donate blood, donate money, volunteer to help others, engage in civic activities, engage in everyday helping behaviors, return lost items to strangers, behave generously in computerized simulations—and even engage in extraordinarily altruistic behaviors like giving strangers their own kidneys. In general, the studies that find otherwise draw from smaller and more selective samples and so may reflect inadvertent biases inherent in these samples, or in the way social status was measured.* In some ways, these findings come as a tremendous relief. The world is becoming wealthier, more educated, and more prosperous. These trends show no sign of slowing or stopping. Can you imagine if all of these changes inexorably led to people becoming more and more selfish as well? What a terrible Faustian bargain it would be, to have to choose between people becoming better off and becoming better hearted. But I don’t think we do.

  There is a big caveat to these findings, however. All the metrics of altruism across the various studies I’ve described share one thing in common that may not be immediately apparent. They focus on altruism toward strangers: donating to charities that help strangers, volunteering to help strangers, mailing letters to strangers, donating blood and kidneys to strangers, and so on. None of these data tell us anything about people’s generosity toward their family, friends, and neighbors. So it isn’t at all correct to
draw the conclusion that people who are better off are more compassionate or generous or altruistic overall. There is no evidence that this is true. The evidence shows only that as people become better off, they are more altruistic toward people they don’t know.

  * Some previous studies identified a u-shaped curve for donations as a function of income, with very low-and very high-income households contributing the most. The analyses of Körndorfer and his colleagues indicate that this may be an artifact of analyses that exclude nondonor households: those that donate nothing. When both donor and nondonor households are analyzed together, to account for the fact that fewer lower-income households make any charitable donations at all, the u-shaped curve becomes a simple linear increase, with donations consistently increasing with household wealth and status.

  The frequency of volunteering across thirty nations as a function of objective (solid line) and subjective (dashed line) social class.

  M. Korndörfer, B. Egloff, and S. C. Schmukle. “A Large Scale Test of the Effect of Social Class on Prosocial Behavior.” PLoS One 10, no. 7 (2015): e0133193.

  This is an important detail, and one that helps to make sense of the patterns that have been observed. Prosperity within a culture tends to be associated with characteristic cultural values and norms that influence how strangers are viewed and treated, including relatively less emphasis on collectivist values and more emphasis on individualist ones. Collectivism entails focusing on and valuing interdependence within a family or community, a mind-set that is essential when resources are scarce and strong social connections are critical to survival. By contrast, individualist values emphasize the independence of the individual and personal instrumental goals.