I went downtown today on the Metro to meet Dan Klein for an EconTalk episode at the DC Hoover Institution offices to record with Dan. I park my car in the Metro lot and get on the parking garage elevator with a rolling suitcase that has my recording equipment. A woman is on the elevator absorbed in her phone and steps out as I step in, thinking she’s on the floor for exiting to the trains. But the elevator has only stopped for me on the 4th floor so she steps back on. When we reach the exit floor she heads out quickly.
There’s a very heavy glass door to get outside. It never works well. And I’m wondering because I’m wheeling this case that’s pretty heavy whether she will hold the door for me, given that she seems to be in a hurry. Indeed she does hold the door, gives me a quick smile and then literally begins to run toward the platform where the trains are. She is wearing some kind of heels and doing the best she can to make time. I roll along as she races ahead of me. When I get to the platform, maybe a three minute walk, she is still there. Her speed ended up buying her nothing as it turned out.
I thanked her again for holding the door and then I asked her why she had done so. She looked puzzled. “I always hold the door,” she said. “But you were in a hurry,” I said. She again looked puzzled. “Did you think about it,” I asked? And of course she said no. I thanked her again and then noticed a tear slowly falling down her cheek. It was cold on the platform. My wife’s eyes can tear up in the cold. Or maybe my door-woman was just struggling to deal with something that was the source of her need to get downtown quickly.
I don’t think she was touched by my gratitude. But I was touched by her very very small act of kindness and loveliness–a small sacrifice of peace of mind to do what she presumed was the right thing to do. A small act of kindness that ended up not delaying her trip, as it turned out. And I was reminded of the Adam Smith virtue of propriety–that sometimes we do the right thing simply because it is the right thing. Economists tend to see the entire world as a giant cost-benefit analysis. And sure, you could treat the opening of a door for a stranger as a selfish act, an act where the cost of delay is worth paying because it outweighs the cost of feeling guilty or some other way of framing kindness. In this view, there is no altruism. Everything is self-interested.
I think this is the wrong way to think about it. Not all behavior is maximizing in this way. Sometimes we just do the right thing because we think it’s good to be a mensch, a person who does what is proper and kind. And yes, I understand you can say that someone who is a mensch is self-interested because feeling like a mensch makes you feel good. But I think that misses what actually happened.
That woman who did the small act of kindness didn’t do a calculation. She did what she thought was right. Period. Sure you can model her behavior as a form of self-interested calculus, but I think that actually misses what happened. She has a rule that she keeps. She opens the door for people who have stuff to roll or carry. And yes, if her hurry had been desperate enough she might not have done it. I get that. But that too would have been impulsive. We are not just calculating machines. Sometimes, we do what we think is lovely and ignore the cost and do it anyway, just for the sake of loveliness.
Ironically, in the conversation with Dan Klein, he returned a number of times to a fascinating point- the idea that being ethical is partly about making being virtuous a form of self-interest. What did he mean? I need to think about it some more but I think he was saying that as we grow as human beings, we can make habits out of virtue so that they become, essentially a form of self-interest. There was much to think about in this idea and I will be chewing on it for a while. You’ll be able to hear it yourself on EconTalk soon. Meanwhile, I hope that woman with the tear on her cheek was just cold. Her small act of kindness warmed my trip downtown.
READER COMMENTS
John Hall
Jan 15 2020 at 9:35am
Great post. This gets to the heart of why I could never get on board with Rand. Assuming people are self-interested is a useful assumption when thinking about some kind of behavior, like the behavior studied in economics. However, it’s a mistake to then leap to thinking that people are always self-interested. It’s a whole additional leap to argue that people should always be self-interested.
Hazel Meade
Jan 17 2020 at 2:34pm
Yes, I think Rand makes kind of an is/ought fallacy. Also, the definition of “selfishness” some objectivists use often degenerates into meaningless semantics. (i.e. Giving people gifts is actually selfish because gift giving makes you happy).
Another problem is that there’s a difference between saying that society generally functions better if people are free to act in their own self interest, and saying that people should always act in their own self interest. In some cases, the reason freer societies function better is because free people will tend to organize “reciprocally altruistic” systems that mutually benefit one-another, even though there’s no conscious understanding of the benefits.
nobody.really
Jan 15 2020 at 11:07am
I sense Roberts is wrestling with the mechanism by which social animals turn socially optimal behavior into individual behavior.
I hypothesize that certain animals have evolved to coordinate their activities, presumably because doing so proofed adaptive—that is, helped them survive and reproduce. Thus, we’ve acquired social skills such as empathy (incorporating our understandings of other people’s welfare into our own utility functions), conformity, etc. In practice, this means that we learn the norms of our group, feel good when we conform to them, and feel bad when we deviate from them.
We observe this in the Ultimatum Game: People who grow up valuing equitable treatment among strangers tend to reject offers that strike them as inequitable—even if doing so costs them money. Apparently they feel an internal sense of reward when they punish someone who violates their norms. We could categorize this behavior as altruistic (promoting a social norm at an individual cost) or selfish (pursuing a feeling of reward)—but I suspect that would merely reflect something about our own mental categories, not something about the behavior we’re observing.
Economists obsess over optimization and the rationale pursuit of it. But as noted by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow, the rational (“slow”) mind is quite literally an afterthought. We have evolved a quick, intuitive mind that is constantly scanning the environment for opportunities and threats, and that has evolved reflexes to deal with the thousands of small decisions that confront us constantly. We bring our rational mind to bear only on the smallest percentage of the issues we face. And the heavier our mental load at any given moment, the more we delegate tasks to our quick, intuitive mind.
For example, when I’m driving with a clear mind, I drive strategically, seeking to optimize my route and my lanes, preserving options to make different terms should I encounter congestion, etc. When I am preoccupied with other concerns, I find that I simply follow the most familiar path to my destination, staying in whatever lane I happen to be in. In the former case, I’m engaging my slow, rational mind; in the latter case, my quick, intuitive mind. I don’t really chose between these options; I simply fall into on or the other based on my cognitive load at the time.
Who can know the circumstances of the woman heading to the subway? But Roberts describes someone who seems preoccupied with a phone call—perhaps an emotional phone call–while trying to avoid missing a train. These meager facts suggest that she was bearing a heavy cognitive load. Under such circumstances, I could imagine that she would delegate decisions over comparatively minor topics, such as whether to hold a door for a stranger, to her default settings. Again, we could characterize her conduct as altruistic or selfish, but I suspect those characterizations would reveal less about the mind of the woman than about our own minds.
In short: Beware imputing to individualism attributes that might better be explained by social dynamics.
Mark Olson
Jan 16 2020 at 1:17pm
I think you’re right. In fact, I’m given to understand that scientists have observed that a similar set of changes has occurred in every single species we humans have ever domesticated. Picture the differences between a wolf and a dog and you’ll get the gist of what those changes have been. Interestingly enough, it appears that we ourselves are the first species to undergo this specific set of changes. It’s thought that we domesticated ourselves when our ancestors began living in closer proximity to one another, making social cooperation more advantageous.
Personally, I suspect that we’re presently bringing ourselves through a similar round of changes once more now that the internet has once again brought us into closer “proximity” with one another, so to speak. I also suspect that we evolved the tendency to criticize/ridicule one another in large part to enforce social conformity. How often are people teased for being too tall or short, too fat or thin, too smart or dumb, too rich or poor, too hardworking or lazy, too serious or silly, or any too “this way” or “that way”? We’ll even tease others for being too normal or weird, perhaps to maintain some level of individual “diversity” within our “tribe”. But I feel that it’s a bit ridiculous to ridicule others for things they didn’t choose and have no real control over.
In cosmology it’s understood that complexity emerges from our universe’s transition between states of low and high entropy itself. This complexity includes the diversity of life here on Earth, but I believe it’s also responsible for everything from diversity of perspective and opinion to the diversity in flavors of potato chips available at your local supermarket. All of which are a perhaps inevitable result of the fundamental laws of nature itself. There’s also a useful mathematical model – the Ising Model – which describes the emergence of social cooperation, among other phenomena.
Alan Goldhammer
Jan 15 2020 at 11:18am
Small acts of kindness should really be automatic. I always hold doors open for others and thank others when they do the same for me. Unfortunately, such acts are become less common.
MarkW
Jan 15 2020 at 2:43pm
Making you feel good for unthinkingly doing virtuous acts was evolution’s way of implementing altruism and cooperation. It’s analogous to evolution making nutritious foods taste good. The acts of kindness may be ‘calculated’ and self-interested at the evolutionary level (and that’s a good thing if you think about it) but it doesn’t mean they’re calculating and self-interested at the psychological level.
I don’t know why people have so much trouble distinguishing between these two levels. Selfish genes produce unselfish individuals because unselfish individuals do better in social species. This is true even in rats.
Fred_in_PA
Jan 16 2020 at 12:11pm
Mark W;
Thank you!
This is so obvious. And yet, somehow, it had escaped me until you put it here.
Perhaps vanity and the attempt to exercise my own agency. Or perhaps too many years of trying to reinforce my students’ tendencies to be ethical by building rationalizations for such behavior.
Thank you, again.
MarkW
Jan 16 2020 at 1:38pm
You’re welcome — I’m glad it made sense to somebody. Of course, the taste for altruism can’t be as automatic and direct as the taste for nutritious foods. That’s because evolution also produces tendencies to cheat in some individuals and situations, so while people love to help others who are deserving and in need, they also hate being taken advantage of (and hate to see others taken advantage of) and will go to some lengths to detect and punish cheaters — to the point where doing so is costly and yields no personal benefit and even when they weren’t the one being cheated (a phenomenon that’s been called ‘altruistic punishment’).
So it’s complicated. Sometimes there is calculation involved in helping — less often in the sense of ‘what’s in it for me’ (though of course that does happen with politicians and sociopaths), but in the sense of ‘does this person deserve the help or are they taking unfair advantage’? There’s still plenty of room for exercising personal agency.
Jackie
Jan 15 2020 at 7:54pm
I taught my son to always hold the door for others. He held it one day for about 18 people, I was already 30 yards ahead of him.
I said thank you to him for being so kind, he said only about 4-5 people said thank you whole the rest didn’t even acknowledge his kindness. He still does this every day!
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
Jan 16 2020 at 8:25am
Dearest Russ,
Yes, more than Max U, like a man going over the top at the Somme, or a woman rising to take care of her severely handicapped child. May I mention that I have said so at (tiresome) length and with considerable evidence in The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity,Bourgeois Equality,Why Liberalism Works, and in maybe a score or two of essays appearing here and there over the past couple of decades? Perhaps you are not familiar with these works. Highly recommended.
Love,
Deirdre
Mark Olson
Jan 16 2020 at 9:23am
I don’t believe that there is such a thing as a truly “selfless” person. As we are each at once both an individual *and* a member of our communities – local, provincial, national, and global – we’re always balancing our own interests with those of our communities in everything we do. I believe that this is important to understand and accept given that the freedoms to do as we choose, and to consume as we choose, are themselves unsustainable without taking responsibility for how what we do and what we consume affects others. Which it does, all around the globe and on down through time.
But what is our actual goal in working, or perhaps in becoming an entrepreneur, anyway? Is it, as many would have it, to make money for ourselves, in the service of our own self-interests? Because that’s the exact same goal pursued by a thief. So what, then, distinguishes “working” from “stealing”? I think it’s whether and how well we’re serving the interests of our communities. And what is the purpose of an economy, anyway? Is it, as economics textbooks would have it, the efficient (and sufficient, I would add) distribution of scarce resources? Or is it a competition between all of us in which our purpose is to possess more of the Earth’s scarce resources than others? In other words, does an economy exist to serve human purposes? Or do humans who have found no higher purpose for themselves think they exist to serve it?
Because in this world it takes money to make money but often costs money just to not have any. The way this plays out over time for us as individuals means that the entire global economy is one giant pyramid scheme. That’s just math. So when the same people who fail to notice this assert that they’re “rational” beings, that’s frankly the most irrational premise I’ve ever heard. Reason can only tell us *how* to do something. Our emotions give us *what* we want to do and *why* we want to do it. So it’s clear to me that presently we – and our economy – are driven by social and status anxieties. Not by reason. But if we know better, we can do better. And in the information age many of us both now know and want to do better. So while doing better is a difficult proposition for everybody, as the popular quote goes: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
A. Anastas
Jan 16 2020 at 9:58am
Being kind and helpful is good for a society, no matter whether you call it selfish or not. Exploiting others is socially damaging, no matter whether you call it selfish or not.
Alice Temnick
Jan 16 2020 at 1:26pm
I teach in a multicultural (as in 120+ countries represented) school. When I note the variations in the performance of student acts of kindness, I often consider what is a likely common influence: good parenting/role modeling.
josé delgado
Jan 17 2020 at 8:53am
I feel good when I do something that it is beneficial for society. I don’t care if somebody get to know that. (I am writing this just to clear out concepts) Sometime I feel it is my duty to do so, because somebody is going to do the same for me anytime. I do this very often. For instance, once I was driving and I saw an electric wire hanging down from a pole (there was a storm the night before). It was 5 am, so no body was on the road, I just drove to the community building (I live in a retired community) got a traffic cone, went back and put the cone on place, so nobody get into trouble. I do this kind of things, as I said, maybe on a weekly basis. How I feel? good, free, common good comes to my mind, it changes my day, I feel useful. Is that self interest? I don’t think so. Maybe is a feeling to belong to a group, to be conscious of human imperfection, up to some point I would say love for any other human being.
Brett
Jan 18 2020 at 4:15pm
Following on Dan Klein’s observation, one of my favorite quotes by Jose Martí: “It is necessary to make virtue fashionable”. Thank you for your continued great work on EconTalk!
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