Commentary: Why does it feel good to give to a charitable cause?

LONDON: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner,” wrote Adam Smith, famously, in The Wealth of Nations, “but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love.”

And I described the sensitive care my father and mother had both received at the Florence Nightingale hospice in Aylesbury. And, finally, I asked people to consider giving money to the hospice.People are kind, so I wasn’t surprised to get a warm response. What I did not expect was to receive anonymous donations of. It seemed a lot of money to give incognito to a local charity in a place you might never visit, in memory of a man you probably never met.

That doesn’t quite seem to cover it either. There is a community of “effective altruists” out there, but they tend to prefer hard evidence, not memorial threads on Twitter. Perhaps they were giving because of what the economist James Andreoni calls the “warm glow” and John List, another economist, terms “impure altruism”. Warm-glow giving is motivated by altruism of a fuzzier kind. Rather than calculating the most effective target for our donations, instead we give because it feels good to believe we’re doing good.Because warm-glow giving is emotional rather than rational, it raises the question of how to persuade people to get themselves in the mood to donate.

Some of these ideas are now proven to increase donations, but social scientists continue to ask what makes people give.Cynthia Cryder and George Loewenstein have found that tangibility matters. People give more generously if they have first been asked to pick a charity from a list than if they’re shown the list and asked first to choose a donation amount, then to pick the charity to receive that donation.

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