New Book Tells How to Inspire People to Make a Difference

Plenty of scientific research shows people have an innate desire to help others, but charities fail to tap those impulses, say two prominent journalists in a new book, A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity.

The authors, Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times, and Sheryl WuDunn, a former reporter at the newspaper, previously collaborated on Half the Sky, about improving the plight of women in the developing world.

In an interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Kristof talked about what he learned researching the book:

Do Americans care about reducing poverty and inequality?

We have compassion at an individual level, and you see that neurologically. When you do brain scans, a person’s brain shows pain when they see somebody else suffering. We’re hard-wired for compassion and empathy on an individual basis, but we tend to be oblivious on a statistical basis. We tend to blame the poor for being poor. We see it as a moral failing.

There’s this remarkable research from Susan Fiske [a professor of psychology and public affairs] at Princeton showing that the brains of successful people process images of the poor and homeless as if they were things, not people. We have difficulty translating an innate compassion and desire to help individuals into any political will to make a broader difference, a broader impact on poverty.

Why don’t organizations that focus on helping the poor get big gifts?

One of the main reasons we give is to gain status in our peer group. Anything you can put your name on tends to get overinvested in. Buildings get overinvested in.

There’s a failure in the philanthropic community that we haven’t figured out how to confer that kind of prestige and psychic reward to people who invest where the needs are greatest. There should be ways, whether through White House galas or Internet registers, to give recognition to people who are doing the most important work even if it’s not a building at the business school.

What frustrates you about philanthropy?

There hasn’t been as much business-mindedness in the charity world as there should have been. There is too much emphasis on inputs and not enough on impact. This has been worsened by an effort to create more accountability through sites like Charity Navigator. There is so much emphasis now on expense ratios that there is an underinvestment in administration and efficiency.

What advice do you have for charities, speaking as a journalist?

Humanitarians tend to flinch at the idea of marketing a good cause, but, boy, it’s so much more important to market matters of life and death than it is to market Coke or Pepsi.

Marketing shouldn’t get short shrift. One has to figure out how to connect with audiences—being earnest is not enough.

Nike got its outside advertising firm to do a brief video called “The Girl Effect,” and millions of people have watched it. There is a lesson there about the need for commercial marketing skills as a way of projecting issues onto the agenda.

What surprises did you encounter while writing the book?

How much evidence there is about the importance of interventions early in life, in the first 1,000 days after conception. We hadn’t appreciated the animal studies, neuroscience, and randomized, controlled trials of practical interventions that all underscore that you get so much more bang for the buck when you work with six-month-old kids than you do with 16-year-olds, yet that is the inverse of how we intervene.

What should charities do based on the research you cite?

The megachurches, which I didn’t know much about, have figured out how to make giving this joyous occasion, a community event where you’re giving in conjunction with others and making it fun. That is something secular communities can learn from.

I’d love to see more mergers and acquisitions in the nonprofit sector. There are all kinds of incentives in the corporate sector for mergers and acquisitions to create scale. In the nonprofit sector, there are so many startups that do great things, the founder loses enthusiasm, and then it dies off. It would be more useful if there were more experimentation with impact investing, double-bottom-line companies, and for-profit models to bring about change.

I wish nonprofits would spend less time fighting each other.

Finally, I’d say that there still tends to be this yearning for a silver bullet. One of the things I’ve seen over a long time reporting is that it’s really hard to find a silver bullet. Life is more about silver buckshots, a lot of little things that make incremental differences, and together they can move the needle a great deal. The search for the solution is the wrong paradigm.