Last week, my colleague Sophie Hudson wrote a blog about whether giving is rational. I’d like to add my own opinion, which is: sometimes yes, sometimes no.
I can see why economists struggle with this question, because economics is about looking after number one. It defines rational, more or less, as “behaving in a way most likely to allow you to maximise resources”.
So it isn’t really set up to look at giving stuff away.
But resources are only a tool to allow an individual to meet more fundamental needs. Darwin’s principle of natural selection teaches that you’re a mechanism to ensure that your genes continue to exist. All behaviour that doesn’t help you and your family reproduce and/or survive will eventually be wiped from the gene pool.
This seems a bit of an odd statement, because there are many kinds of behaviour kicking around that don’t help us achieve these things.
But it seems likely that these exist either because a) they used to be helpful in the historical environment where humans evolved or b) those behaviours would be useful in a slightly different form.
There are hundreds of examples of this, from our love for fatty foods, to the dry mouth you get before a job interview, to the inability of teenage boys to concentrate on lessons at school that will shape their lives. All of these are results of behaviour that was handy until a few centuries ago, and which we’ve just not outgrown.
I think giving is mostly driven by the rational part of our brains. But there’s a slice of those unconscious and outdated instincts in there, too.
After all, giving to charity is hardly the only time when we give something away expecting nothing back. We hold the door open for people at work. We buy a round of drinks. We send thank-you cards. We give colleagues leaving presents. All of these are part of a complex network of social customs that tell people, in minute detail, where they stand.
Charitable giving is another social indicator. If someone decides they want to run a marathon, most people give willingly, because it shows friendship and support, and because they know you’d do the same for them. But also because if they don’t, their social status is lowered.
This desire to give for social status can lead the rich, in particular, to make lavish gifts. Sometimes it’s an assertion of their primacy. If you sponsor something big, particularly if you get to put your name on it, then everyone knows how rich you really are.
Giving can also be symbolic. We give to causes that have affected us personally, and which mirror our own beliefs.
Health causes receive most of their donations from people who’ve been touched personally by a particular disease. Giving to causes like Amnesty International and Oxfam is an effective way of telling the world your attitude about how it should look. Both of these are pretty rational. They allow us to tell ourselves, and those around us, about our views and beliefs.
But we also give, without telling anyone, to support starving children and abandoned puppies that we will never ever see. This doesn’t seem rational at all.
Perhaps, in some ways, it isn’t. Perhaps it’s just that our brains are still shaped for a stone age world with a few hundred people in it, in which you can’t travel faster than you can walk.
Because of this, we respond to people’s stories as if they were standing right in front of us.
On the other hand, it’s hard to argue this behaviour is completely irrational. Because without our tendency to behave with perfect decency towards people we’ve never met, it doesn’t seem likely society could function at all.