Carrion Luggage

No Good Deed

Another one from the BBC today, though it's a few years old.

    Why overly kind and moral people can rub you up the wrong way  

Because you suspect they're faking it?

Have you ever come across someone who is incredibly kind and morally upright – and yet also deeply insufferable?

"Morally upright" is a loaded phrase, though. Some people think it's a moral imperative to hate entire groups of people for who they are, for example. But I think the article is talking about their actions relative to your own standards.

They might try to do anything they can to help you or engage in a host of important, useful activities benefiting friends and the wider community.

Those absolute wankers! How dare they?!

Yet they seem a little bit too pleased with their good deeds and, without any good reason to think so, you suspect that there’s something calculated about their altruism.

Okay, yeah, it's the attitude I can see being the problem, not necessarily the deeds.

Yet this scepticism is a known behaviour, described by psychologists as “do-gooder derogation”.

Oh, come on, shrinks; you can come up with a catchier name than that.

And while the phenomenon may seem to be wholly irrational, there are some compelling evolutionary reasons for being wary of unreciprocated altruism.

Lovely. Now we'll get treated to a slew of unsupported evolutionary psychology hypotheses.

One of the earliest and most systematic examinations of do-gooder derogation comes from a global study by Simon Gächter, a professor of psychology at the University of Nottingham in the UK.

Nottingham... Nottingham... now why does that sound familiar? Something about a bad guy who became a folk hero. It's right on the tip of my brain.

I'm just saying, maybe there's a bit of bias in Nottingham.

Like many studies into altruism, his experiment took the form of a “public goods game”.

Normally, this is where I'd close the window. Games don't necessarily reflect real life. Lately, I've been playing a video game as an assassin/thief. Would I do that shit in meatworld? Hell, no. Not just because there tend to be severe penalties if caught, but because I think it's wrong to harm people who aren't trying to harm you.

I've also played similar games as a fine, upstanding, knight in shining armor type. Point is, it's a game, and it doesn't translate to reality.

You want another example? Play Monopoly with your friends sometime. See how long they stay your friends.

(The article describes the psych game's rules and methods.)

Somehow, selfishness and selflessness were considered to be morally equivalent.

Well, I do tend to think that everyone does everything for, ultimately, selfish reasons. It's just that some of the stuff we do, like donating to a relief fund or taking care of a sick person, also helps other people. We wouldn't do it if it didn't feel good on some level.

Strikingly, this tendency seems to emerge early in life – at around the age of eight.

Before which, presumably, we don't think about other people at all.

To understand the origins of this seemingly irrational behaviour, we need to consider how human altruism emerged in the first place.

According to evolutionary psychology...

Groan.

...hardwired human behaviours should have evolved to improve our survival and our ability to pass on our genes to another generation. In the case of altruism, generous acts could help us to foster good relationships within the group which, over time, help to build social capital and status.

1. We're not machines. "Hardwired" is a shit metaphor.

2. Okay, at least they use "could" instead of "did."

Importantly, however, reputation is “positional” – if one person rises, the others fall. This can create a strong sense of competition, which means that we’re always alert to the possibility that other people are getting ahead of us, even if they are achieving their status through altruism. We’ll be especially resentful if we think that the other person was only looking for those reputational benefits, rather than acting out of a genuine interest in others, since it may suggest a cunning and manipulative personality more generally.

Well. That seems plausible. This doesn't mean it's true or false. It, like most evo-psych, appears to be largely guesswork, working backwards from observed behavio(u)rs.

All this means that altruistic behaviour can make us walk a metaphorical tightrope. We need to balance our generosity perfectly, so that we are seen as cooperative and good, without arousing the suspicion that we are acting solely for the status.

See the problem here? That bit's still couched in language implying manipulation and calculation, rather than, you know, just wanting to help people for the sake of being a good family member or neighbor.

Ryan Carlson, a graduate student at Yale University, agrees that altruistic behaviours are often appraised from multiple angles besides the generosity of the act itself. “We don’t just value altruism – we value integrity and honesty, which are other signals of our moral character,” he says.

Yep, people do seem to appreciate integrity and honesty. So if you can fake those qualities, you're golden.

The research might also help us to avoid accidental faux pas when we act altruistically ourselves. At the very least, the research shows that you should avoid noisily broadcasting your good deeds.

I've never felt comfortable being noisy about any good I might accidentally do in the world.

Ultimately, the only fool-proof way to avoid do-gooder derogation may be to do your best deeds in complete secret.

Oh, I don't think that's the only way. "Don't do any good deeds" is another. If, you know, you're a complete bellend.

Okay, so, ultimately, the article is yet another ad for a book (which is promoted in the endnote therein). So, where does this author stand on the altruism scale, if he's apparently doing the good deed of illuminating a quirk of human psychology... for profit?

No, I don't have an answer for that. Making money is not in and of itself a bad thing; it's only when people pass some arbitrary threshold of greediness, and/or do it fraudulently, that I have a problem with it. I just find the potential contradiction, as usual, amusing.