Nicholas Kristof's Advice for Saving the World , (interesting piece with some Randian overtones)
outsideonline.com
THE RECENT RESEARCH in social psychology offers a couple of central lessons. The first is a bit surprising: We intervene not because of stories of desperate circumstances but when we can be cheered up with positive stories of success and transformation. For example, one experiment found that people are quite willing to pay for a water-treatment facility to save 4,500 lives in a refugee camp with 11,000 people in it, but they are much less willing to pay for the same facility to save 4,500 lives when the refugee camp is said to have 250,000 inhabitants. In effect, what matters is saving a high proportion of people, not just a large number of lives. Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon who has pioneered this field of research, notes that saving a large proportion of a group is very satisfying, while saving a small proportion seems like a failure?even if it's a high number. All this fits in with a large body of research that suggests that people do good things in part because it feels good. The irony: Altruism creates its own selfish reward. Or, to put it another way, nobody gains more selfish pleasure than those who act selflessly. |
