Doing your good deed for the day

From Beck's article:

If you have ever worked in the restaurant industry you know the reputation of the Sunday morning lunch crowd. Millions of Christians go to lunch after church on Sundays and their behavior is abysmal...

Yikes. I worked at a small breakfast & lunch restaurant for 4 years of Sundays and never noticed this. We had a noticeable rush after the 8AM, 10AM, and 11:30 masses let out so we had a sizable Catholic crowd and I never took note of their behavior.

Not trusting my own memory, I called my mother who's been a waitress at various restaurants for 30 years, most recently including 9 years serving the after-church crowd every Sunday. I asked her whether the churchgoers behaved any differently than the other customers. She said no. I told her about Beck's article. She said they didn't act any worse or better than other customers.

Just a little anecdotal counter-evidence to reduce your possible confirmation bias the next time you go out to lunch on a Sunday. I live in Massachusetts. My mother is Catholic. Obviously the overarching point of the post may still be valid.

There's some research showing the opposite effect: escalation of good-deed-doing as one good deed leads to another. For instance, a classic study on the foot-in-the-door technique found that people who were asked to put a small "keep California beautiful" sign in their window were later more likely to agree to put a huge "drive carefully" sign in their yard (as an apparently unrelated request). This escalation could also be due to a self-signaling process, as people come to believe that they're the type of person who does this sort of thing.

Part of the difference is the time scale: the self-satisfaction of doing a good deed may fade relatively quickly, while the strengthened commitment to do-gooding persists for longer. That actually fits with Baumeister's view of willpower. He's argued that willpower is like a muscle: when used it tires in the short term but is strengthened for the the long term.

So it's hard to say whether involvement in symbolic do-gooding like church, Facebook groups, or political arguments helps or hinders the pursuit of genuinely important moral causes. They're not necessarily sinkholes - they could be useful practice, building moral fiber instead of wasting it. If you let them take over and you never do anything besides "practicing," though, then you may have a problem.

I'm seeing tons of this on Facebook regarding Haiti relief. A proliferation of groups and events like "Wear Red for Haiti" and "Pray for Haiti" and "For every person who joins this group, I'll give $1 for Haiti, because I'm a millionaire attention whore, and hey look someone wrote 'gullible' on the ceiling" (paraphrasing, granted) and "Sending Reiki Energy Healing to Haiti" (*RAGE*). I feel like they could all have the same title: "Join here to feel better about not donating actual money to actual people doing actual helpful work in Haiti."

Cute ending. If course donating money to orgs should not be enough - they should be orgs that actually do something helpful, not just orgs whose heart is in the right place.

This reminds me of an article I read about taxi drivers who would go home early after making their daily quota instead of staying on the road longer when business was good. Everyone (the drivers, their company, the potential customers) would be better off if they kept working.

Similarly, when people meet their daily quota of good deeds, they stop being good, even though it would be better for everyone (the do-gooder, their society, and the people they counterfactually could have been good to) if they kept doing good.

Is there a general quota-bias at work here? Or is my pattern-finding algorithym misfiring?

That's an interesting effect, but satiety isn't permanent. Indulging an appetite may increase it over a longer time scale (e.g. food and sex). I hope to see similar experiments that cover a significant time (at least a week).

Consciously try not to count anything [you] do as charitable or morally relevant except actually donating money to organizations.

This can be as wrong as what you're trying to counteract. The ideal is to credit work you do, and dollars you donate, only on the actual effect.

Voting Republican

"Republican" here must just stand for "your favored party", if what's important is the feeling of doing the virtuous thing (some mercenary votes are excused, e.g. choosing a president from your home state so it will get more pork).

This does not prove that environmentalists are actually bad people - remember that whether a subject purchased green products or normal products was completely randomized. It does suggest that people who have done one nice thing feel less of an obligation to do another.

No, I think it suggests that people who feel they were coerced into "being good" by people with a different notion of "good" are in a foul mood for some time thereafter.

I wonder how long-lasting this "quota" effect is. The study only looked at the immediate effects of moral behavior, not the more important long-term effects.

To make an analogy with physical exercise, maybe flexing your moral muscles exhausts your ability to be moral for the rest of the day, but when you wake up tomorrow your moral strength will be not only restored but actually strengthened. Most forms of exertion I can think of (e.g. learning, writing, working) work like this, so I wouldn't be surprised if the same held for doing good deeds.

I wonder if the is opposite true. Steal a movie. Watch some twisted porn. Post a shocker in a kids' forum. Become ridden with guilt. Be motivated to do more charity.

This is exactly the type of research which I would like to see reproduced thoroughly before drawing any conclusions.

I think it's especially interesting that we "buy" a moral reputation through very public, symbolic actions and "spend" this moral reputation by being an asshole to people. I would like to see the opposite study done - if people who perform less public moral actions then choose to forgo the more public moral actions.

Hypothesis: The opposite effect would happen - people would become more willing to publicly signal after doing something genuinely nice. Why? Because they just went through all the effort to be moral, and nobody knows! So they feel entitled to a bit of moral grandstanding.

I don't think that you have reason to assume that the short term effects are the same effects as the long term effects.

We behave on average like the person we think we are. A single good action doesn't result in updating our self identity and it's easier to just update the other actions to be the person you think you are in the short term. In the long term however, doing good things changes your self image in a way where you think that you are the kind of person who does good things.

Note: The original study link is now broken. Here's an archive.org version:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100328180845/http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/newthinking/greenproducts.pdf

Great example of ways to feel good without actually doing anything right here:

http://no2mininginpalawan.com/2011/04/01/5-ways-you-can-help-save-palawan-right-now/

Even growing up in the Boy Scouts, I've been suspicious of the "do a good deed daily", and been trying to do good deeds at every opportunity -- but this is important to know. Thank you.

I wonder if being a "professional" environmentalist would not level this effect (in this particular setting), because once you start identifying something as A Job, it stops being quite so much a part of You. Or, rather, it becomes a different part.

Similarly, do people who routinely help at soup kitchens get desensitized to helping-poor-people-derived warm fuzzies?

I think that moral balancing is probably a subtype of what we might call "willpower balancing," because I've noticed that I engage in this sort of behavior in situations where the only person who suffers from it is me. For instance, I've gone off my diet after I've had a good job interview. I explicitly remember thinking "I've done enough for the day, I deserve to indulge."

People tend to work on the basis of checking off each of their must-do satisfaction actions for a day: 1) Catch/gather food, or do something to pay for food. Check. 2) Eat/stockpile food or stuff to barter for food. Check. 3) Do I have kids? Make sure they're still around and fed. Check. 4) Kid's other parent around? Have sex, if we're not too tired. Check?

(Note this is not a caveman kind of thing. This is my basic day, and I suspect the basic day of many others.)

Most religions are constructed around lists of things you're not supposed to do, because these lists are the only way to get the attention of things-to-do off-checking people. "I could get my food ration for the day by bonking that guy over there. But, I'm not supposed to steal, so, won't do that." We absorb those "Thou shalt nots" pretty early, for the most part, and then we move on to efficiently guiding ourselves and our families through the day. Most people get pretty good at this.

So, once we're good at checking off our satisfaction list without breaking the rules, what do we do with our left-over intellectual capacity/stockpiled food-barter? The traditional expectation in charity from every "good Christian" is "10% of your income." (Most think you can substitute volunteer time for some of that.) Also, traditionally, all that money and time went to or through the Church, but still, it's a good jumping off point. The 10% tithing, with volunteer work as acceptable substitute, rule is right there, waiting for you. But we, here, are not interested in blindly following rules that were made long, long ago in a completely different era. We want optimization.

(aside: if even a slim majority of well-off people followed tithing rules, whether to churches or to SIAI or anywhere in between, it might be horribly inefficient, but I've a feeling it would also be adequate to address most charitable needs. Still, in discussions here we aren't just interested in solving the problems we've got now, but also in having approaches that would theoretically solve whatever problems arose. /aside)

The next easiest thing for us to do is to add to our satisfaction checklist: 5) Be nice to someone. This is perhaps what most people do. The studies described fit with this, and though that doesn't prove the validity of the hypothesis, it does describe how I feel, myself. So, I offer it for consideration.

But I think the checklist has an internal daily quality to it--that is, the checklist resets daily, because the things we always have to get done, like eating and feeding the kids, usually need to get done daily or close to daily. (I think this has implications for those pondering the value of knocking off work on good days vs bad days. I find it is difficult to plan satisfaction over multiple days. Not impossible, but strategies that do not require adherence to multiple-day [as opposed to single-day or lifetime] pre-commitments may do demonstrably better.)

So, I think your chip-in-the-jar method has real merit, because it bypasses the difficulty of planning to do good things over multiple days. However, it may cause you to donate your time less than might be optimal, or to donate to new causes that might be worthy, because you daily see the jars and the good work you're planning, so beware.

Fundamentally, if my hypothesis is correct, I'm saying the gratification from doing good things may come from our own self-programming. So, A) reducing acclaim for certain acts may not make a difference, B) talking about morality often is still important, to keep being nice on the checklist C) consciously withholding self-reward for small acts may work, but it may also serve to extinct the conditioning you've already built up. Be careful when self-programming! D) The religious self-program much less than we do, and they are more charitable. If we are rational, we should do better than they. (Ack, Can't find the link where I read that exact thing here...have to go!)

Interesting, and I can think of my own examples easily enough. I would like it tested over time as a previous commenter mentioned. I wonder has science isolated the "sharing / good deed" segments of the brain, as they have for certain other moral decisions? (see here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnXmDaI8IEo , in the interests of your time skip ahead to 10:00 in to bypass Dawkin's introduction and subsequent thanks segment)

This reminds me of the whole carbon neutral thing. Donate money until it counters out the bad you do, and then stop.

I figure if you're going to counter out your carbon footprint, you might as well counter out a few other people while you're at it.

Very interesting.

If this is true, then I need to spam all my friends to join some Facebook charity groups.

We know that most charities basically throw away all their money. If we can get people to do less charity, world will be a better place. Paradoxically by Facebook charity groups, which hopefully can get viral and stop more and more people from money wasting.

Donating money to organizations!?! Since the point of most moral behaviour appears to be to signal what a fine individual you are to your peers, donating to organizations seems like a terribly ineffective way to do that.

Perhaps consider doing a sponsored run - or something else that actively involves your social network - like plaguing your friends with cause invitations. Such actions are typically far more effective at signaling your good nature to your peers than attempting to do something that is actually helpful to others.