Charity is slightly corrupting. Free Technical Library News

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Charity slightly corrupts

09.12.2015

You can often hear that you need to help a hungry person not with money or food, but give him a fishing rod or a gun so that he can get this food for himself. Otherwise, with money in hand, a person will become lazy, lose all activity and sink even deeper into poverty, expecting that sooner or later everything will fall into his hands. Although the theory is controversial, we are already somewhat accustomed to it. But researchers from the University of Amsterdam claim something more strange - they believe that selfless donations have a bad effect on the moral character of the one who donates.

Psychologists used a charity fundraising campaign that took place on Christmas Eve in several Dutch cities: people were invited right on the street to make a donation to the Red Cross and other similar organizations. Those who were noticed near the fundraising point were asked to answer several questions about whether they made a donation and how large, whether they are involved in charity at all, and whether they are ready, for example, to live in a way that does less harm to the environment (relatively speaking, I wanted to would a person pay for environmentally friendly electricity, and whether he would like to sign some kind of environmental petition). In their article in Social Influence, the authors of the work write that those of those surveyed who made a donation during the last week were less likely to do so afterwards. That is, the same environmental problems touched them less, and they were less willing to pay more for green energy and sign petitions than those who had not yet had time to perform an act of charity. Moreover, the size of the contribution, which is curious, did not play a role, the desire to participate in something similar fell regardless of whether the person contributed five euros or a thousand.

In fact, psychologists have long been discussing the so-called "license effect", when a good deed, as it were, gives permission to be slightly bad. Such psychological bargaining with oneself generally occurs often: for example, when a person, after going to the gym, immediately goes to some eatery to eat something fatty and sweet. In the socio-economic sphere, this is manifested in the fact that we, as it were, get from another source what we spent in the right (good, altruistic) act. So, two years ago, an article was published in Energy Policy, which described how people who agreed to save water for environmental reasons began to use more electricity.

However, this effect is not too large (although statistically significant) and depends on other factors. For example, in the case of Christmas donations, those who donated money frequently in general responded very readily to environmental proposals. That is, let's say, the general moral character of a person plays a role: one who is greedy by nature can give in to a momentary impulse, but then he will try to compensate for the "damage". In addition, as psychologists themselves say, we still need to figure out the motivation for donation: it is possible that someone just drowns out the feeling of guilt because of some misconduct in the past, and his subsequent “slightly bad” behavior is quite a common thing, not related to the charity gesture just made.

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