Embed Doc
Copy Link
Readcast
Collections

CommentGo Back

8:30 – 10:30am Session Five

Altruistic Behaviour Research and Neuroeconomics

Moderator:G

ARY

TEINBERG

, M.D., Ph.D., Director, Stanford Institute of Neuro-Innovation and Translational Neurosciences, Stanford University B

ILL

ARBAUGH

, Ph.D., Economics, University of OregonU

LRICH

AYR

, Ph.D., Psychology, University of Oregon J

NDREONI

, Ph.D., Economics, University of California, San DiegoDiscussants: D

ACHER

ELTNER

, Ph.D., Psychology, University of California, Berkeley

Is it Better to Give or to Receive?Bill Harbaugh, Ph.D.

University of Oregon While every charitable act involves a recipient as well as a giver, almost allexperimental work on altruism focuses on the giver. The research in this proposal isdesigned to complete the circle, by providing a neural explanation for what goes on insidethe minds of people who are receiving charity. Charity is a mixed blessing, and we think thatknowledge about how recipients feel about receiving help can guide more effective and moregenuinely altruistic methods of giving. We believe that the choices and feelings of therecipients are every bit as important as those of the givers, both in terms of the effectivenessof charitable projects in practical and utilitarian terms, and also in terms of understanding the true motives of the donors. This point is well recognized in anthropology and inreligion. For example one reason for Maimonides’s preference for secret gifts, a cornerstoneof Judaic thought about charity, is that they do not humiliate the recipient.Our pilot experiment tests the hypotheses that recipients of charity care about how they became eligible for the aid and how much the aid to them costs other deserving people. The experiment uses financial aid to college students, since this is a relatively homogenousgroup with easily measured characteristics. We recruit students with GPA's above 3.0 whoare also receiving federal financial aid (loans or grants), on the basis of low family income. We then give students modest “fellowships” ($50 to $150) based on the criteria below.

•

Moderate Merit: GPA > 3.0

•

Moderate Need: Eligible for federal loans but not the maximum Pell grant

•

High Merit: GPA > 3.8

•

High Need: Eligible for the maximum Pell grant (very low family income) To provide the neural data to disentangle reactions to aid and choice processing,there are both mandatory and voluntary conditions. In the mandatory conditions, subjectsare just told that they have received a certain amount from a certain fund, and we will recordthe resulting brain activation. In the voluntary conditions subjects are given a series of choices between accepting different amounts from different funds. As in any charitablesituation, when a subject gets aid, less will be available in that fund to distribute to the others. This will be implemented by giving any aid not distributed in the experiment away to othereligible students. We have run 24 subjects and have analyzed the behavioral data. Subjects are very sensitive to the variables of interest: they are more likely to accept aid when they arequalified with respect to GPA or need, they prefer merit aid to need aid, and they are lesslikely to accept aid when it reduces what is available for others. We’re currently analyzing theneural data, and we hope to have preliminary results to present at the conference.Questions:1. While looking at receivers is rare in experimental economics, we know that it’s morecommon in other disciplines. Bill had an interesting conversation with Scotty in Seattle aboutthe Christian social justice movement, and the desirability of decreasing the stigmaassociated with receiving charity. We need to learn more about this stigma effect, more aboutattitudes from other religions, and more about analyses from non-economic disciplines. Webelieve that religious traditions can be thought as filters of good and bad practices regarding altruism, with centuries of time to refine those practices. Most have clear teachings aboutgiving. What do religions teach about the feelings of the recipients of charities? What are theconnections between what a religion has to say about giving, and what it has to say aboutreceiving?2. We want this research to lead in the direction of practical applications for the design of programs that give to others. These could be government programs or private charities. Oneapproach would be to see negative feelings about receiving charity as a tradeoff: they reducethe benefits that the deserving get from charity, but they decrease the likelihood that theundeserving will take up the charity, and reduce the amount available for others. Somepolicies might actually try to reinforce these negative feelings, to increase the chances thatcharity goes to the most deserving. Clearly a better understanding of the feelings of thereceivers is important to doing this efficiently. What other aspects of the feelings of receivers are likely to matter for policy?3. It seems likely that the charity has a sort of “option value” to the potential recipients.Knowing that it’s available provides a safety net. Using it has obvious benefits. Knowing thatthey did not use it, but left it for someone more deserving – may create additional emotionalbenefits. In sort, looking at receivers seems to create a much richer picture of charity and

compassion, and we’d like people to think about other similar examples, and how they mightbe studied.4. Truly altruistic givers must think about the feelings of the recipients – not just about whether they need the assistance, or in what form it should be provided, but also about how charity will make them feel. In some traditions the giver is actually beholden to the recipient – because the recipient provides the giver with a chance to be altruistic. We would like todiscuss possible experiments that might explicitly link the givers and recipients together, andexamine these sorts of mutual benefits and their effect on giving.

Neural Evidence Reveals Motives behind Altruistic Behavior:Ulrich Mayr, Ph.D.

University of OregonPeople can show altruistic behavior. However, as there is almost always a many-to-onemapping between potential motives and behavior, researchers across disciplines havedebated for decades whether altruistic behavior is motivated by either "true altruism" or lesscharitable motives (such as signaling of wealth or character). Neuroimaging provides a new way of assessing motives of behavior by observing individuals' activity in "reward areas" tocritical events, even in the absence of a behavioral choice. I discuss here how this approachcan be used to distinguish between different motives of charitable giving (Harbaugh, Mayr,& Burghart, 2007). Our results are consistent with a rational choice explanation of altruisticbehavior where money to oneself and money to the charity independently enter into utility computations. In ongoing work we examine whether more complicated situations, such asgiving in public versus private, can be handled by the same simple model or whether it needsto be augmented by additional pathways to altruistic behavior.Questions:1. What are potential pedagogical implications of the fact that altruistic behavior can engagereward areas?2. Can the basic "neuroeconomic rational-choice model", which assumes that every behavioral choice is funneled through utility computations in midbrain reward areas, accountfor the whole range of altruistic behavior?3. Our results suggest that how much we like money for ourselves and how much we like tosee others better off independently predict altruistic behavior (with opposing signs). Whatare the psychological and economic factors that determine each of these two aspects?

Understanding Altruistic and Charitable acts from the Standpoint of Economics James Andreoni, Ph.D.