May 18, 2000 | Read Time: 1 minute
Charities have long known that naming buildings after donors or recognizing patrons in publications can be effective tools for fund raising. But now a team of Swiss evolutionary biologists has conducted an experiment that demonstrates the key role that public recognition plays in motivating people to give, according to their report published in Science magazine (May 5).
The scientists, Claus Wedekind and Manfred Milinski, designed a game using 79 students in which each player had to decide how much money he or she wished to donate to other players. But none of the students knew the others’ identities, so they could not set up a direct exchange of money or favor gifts to players who had helped them.
The only information players had about the other participants was an “image score” reflecting an individual’s “reputation and status” based on their altruistic tendencies.
The study found that the players were most likely to give to those who had been generous themselves, and that they tended to withhold money from those whose scores showed a reputation for stinginess.
Such experiments attempt “to explain how helping others can emerge in a Darwinian world of ‘selfish genes,’ ” say Martin A. Nowak and Karl Sigmund, whose analysis of the Swiss study appears in the same issue.
The Swiss experiment shows the major role that “moral pressure” plays in philanthropy, according to the commentators. “The information flow within the social group is all-important; we feel cheated when our good deeds go unnoticed, and refrain from bad deeds lest they become known.”
The report on the Swiss study and the related commentary are available online, for a fee, at http://sciencemag.org.
