Part 13 (2/2)

List can at least be consoled by knowing that he is almost certainly correct. Let's consider some of the forces that make such lab stories unbelievable.

The first is selection bias. Think back to the tricky nature of doctor report cards. The best cardiologist in town probably attracts the sickest and most desperate patients. So if you're keeping score solely by death rate, that doctor may get a failing grade even though he is excellent.

Similarly, are the people who volunteer to play Dictator more cooperative than average? Quite likely yes. Scholars long before John List pointed out that behavioral experiments in a college lab are ”the science of just those soph.o.m.ores who volunteer to partic.i.p.ate in research and who also keep their appointment with the investigator.” Moreover, such volunteers tend to be ”scientific do-gooders” who ”typically have...[a] higher need for approval and lower authoritarianism than non-volunteers.”

Or maybe, if you're not a do-gooder, you simply don't partic.i.p.ate in this kind of experiment. That's what List observed during his baseball-card study. When he was recruiting volunteers for the first round, which he clearly identified as an economics experiment, he made note of which dealers declined to partic.i.p.ate. In the second round, when List dispatched customers to see if unwitting dealers would rip them off, he found that the dealers who declined to partic.i.p.ate in the first round were, on average, the biggest cheaters.

Another factor that pollutes laboratory experiments is scrutiny. When a scientist brings a lump of uranium into a lab, or a mealworm or a colony of bacteria, that object isn't likely to change its behavior just because it's being watched by someone in a white lab coat.

For human beings, however, scrutiny has a powerful effect. Do you run a red light when there's a police car-or, increasingly these days, a mounted camera-at the intersection? Thought not. Are you more likely to wash your hands in the office restroom if your boss is already was.h.i.+ng hers? Thought so.

Our behavior can be changed by even subtler levels of scrutiny. At the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in England, a psychology professor named Melissa Bateson surrept.i.tiously ran an experiment in her own department's break room. Customarily, faculty members paid for coffee and other drinks by dropping money into an ”honesty box.” Each week, Bateson posted a new price list. The prices never changed, but the small photograph atop the list did. On odd weeks, there was a picture of flowers; on even weeks, a pair of human eyes. When the eyes were watching, Bateson's colleagues left nearly three times as much money in the honesty box. So the next time you laugh when a bird is frightened off by a silly scarecrow, remember that scarecrows work on human beings too.

How does scrutiny affect the Dictator game? Imagine you're a student-a soph.o.m.ore, probably-who volunteered to play. The professor running the experiment may stay in the background, but he's plainly there to record which choices the partic.i.p.ants are making. Keep in mind that the stakes are relatively low, just $20. Keep in mind also that you got the $20 just for showing up, so you didn't work for the money.

Now you are asked if you'd like to give some of your money to an anonymous student who didn't get $20 for free. You didn't really want to keep all that money, did you? You may not like this particular professor; you might even actively dislike him-but no one wants to look cheap in front of somebody else. What the heck, you decide, I'll give away a few of my dollars. But even a c.o.c.keyed optimist wouldn't call that altruism.

In addition to scrutiny and selection bias, there's one more factor to consider. Human behavior is influenced by a dazzlingly complex set of incentives, social norms, framing references, and the lessons gleaned from past experience-in a word, context. We act as we do because, given the choices and incentives at play in a particular circ.u.mstance, it seems most productive to act that way. This is also known as rational behavior, which is what economics is all about.

It isn't that the Dictator partic.i.p.ants didn't behave in context. They did. But the lab context is unavoidably artificial. As one academic researcher wrote more than a century ago, lab experiments have the power to turn a person into ”a stupid automaton” who may exhibit a ”cheerful willingness to a.s.sist the investigator in every possible way by reporting to him those very things which he is most eager to find.” The psychiatrist Martin Orne warned that the lab encouraged what might best be called forced cooperation. ”Just about any request which could conceivably be asked of the subject by a reputable investigator,” he wrote, ”is legitimized by the quasi-magical phrase ”This is an experiment.'”

Orne's point was borne out rather spectacularly by at least two infamous lab experiments. In a 196162 study designed to understand why n.a.z.i officers obeyed their superiors' brutal orders, the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram got volunteers to follow his instructions and administer a series of increasingly painful electric shocks-at least they thought the shocks were painful; the whole thing was a setup-to unseen lab partners. In 1971, the Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted a prison experiment, with some volunteers playing guards and others playing inmates. The guards started behaving so s.a.d.i.s.tically that Zimbardo had to shut down the experiment.

When you consider what Zimbardo and Milgram got their lab volunteers to do, it is no wonder that the esteemed researchers who ran the Dictator game, with its innocuous goal of transferring a few dollars from one undergrad to another, could, as List puts it, ”induce almost any level of giving they desire.”

When you look at the world through the eyes of an economist like John List, you realize that many seemingly altruistic acts no longer seem so altruistic.

It may appear altruistic when you donate $100 to your local public-radio station, but in exchange you get a year of guilt-free listening (and, if you're lucky, a canvas tote bag). U.S. citizens are easily the world's leaders in per-capita charitable contributions, but the U.S. tax code is among the most generous in allowing deductions for those contributions.

Most giving is, as economists call it, impure altruism or warm-glow altruism. You give not only because you want to help but because it makes you look good, or feel good, or perhaps feel less bad.

Consider the panhandler. Gary Becker once wrote that most people who give money to panhandlers do so only because ”the unpleasant appearance or persuasive appeal of beggars makes them feel uncomfortable or guilty.” That's why people often cross the street to avoid a panhandler but rarely cross over to visit one.

And what about U.S. organ-donation policy, based on its unyielding belief that altruism will satisfy the demand for organs-how has that worked out?

Not so well. There are currently 80,000 people in the United States on a waiting list for a new kidney, but only some 16,000 transplants will be performed this year. This gap grows larger every year. More than 50,000 people on the list have died over the past twenty years, with at least 13,000 more falling off the list as they became too ill to have the operation.

If altruism were the answer, this demand for kidneys would have been met by a ready supply of donors. But it hasn't been. This has led some people-including, not surprisingly, Gary Becker-to call for a well-regulated market in human organs, whereby a person who surrenders an organ would be compensated in cash, a college scholars.h.i.+p, a tax break, or some other form. This proposal has so far been greeted with widespread repugnance and seems for now politically untenable.

Recall, meanwhile, that Iran established a similar market nearly thirty years ago. Although this market has its flaws, anyone in Iran needing a kidney transplant does not have to go on a waiting list. The demand for transplantable kidneys is being fully met. The average American may not consider Iran the most forward-thinking nation in the world, but surely some credit should go to the only country that has recognized altruism for what it is-and, importantly, what it's not.

If John List's research proves anything, it's that a question like ”Are people innately altruistic?” is the wrong kind of question to ask. People aren't ”good” or ”bad.” People are people, and they respond to incentives. They can nearly always be manipulated-for good or ill-if only you find the right levers.

So are human beings capable of generous, selfless, even heroic behavior? Absolutely. Are they also capable of heartless acts of apathy? Absolutely.

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