In the second version, List gave Annika another option: she could still give Zelda any amount of her money but, if she preferred, she could instead take $1 from Zelda. If the dictators were altruistic, this tweak to the game shouldn’t matter at all; it should only affect the people who otherwise would have given nothing. All List did was expand the dictator’s “choice set” in a way that was irrelevant for all but the stingiest of players.
But only 35 percent of the Annikas in this modified, steal-a-dollar-if-you-want version gave any money to Zelda. That was just half the number who gave in the original Dictator. Nearly 45 percent, meanwhile, didn’t give a penny, while the remaining 20 percent took a dollar from Zelda.
Hey, what happened to all the altruism?
But List didn’t stop there. In the third version, Annika was told that Zelda had been given the same amount of money that she, Annika, was given. And Annika could steal Zelda’s entire payment—or, if she preferred, she could give Zelda any portion of her own money.
What happened? Now only 10 percent of the Annikas gave Zelda any money, while more than 60 percent of the Annikas took from Zelda. More than 40 percent of the Annikas took all of Zelda’s money. Under List’s guidance, a band of altruists had suddenly—and quite easily—been turned into a gang of thieves.
The fourth and final version of List’s experiment was identical to the third—the dictator could steal the other player’s entire pile of money—but with one simple twist. Instead of being handed some money to play the game, as is standard in such lab experiments, Annika and Zelda first had to work for it. (List needed some envelopes stuffed for another experiment, and with limited research funds he was killing two birds with one stone.)
After they worked, it was time to play. Annika still had the option of taking all of Zelda’s money, as more than 60 percent of the Annikas did in the previous version. But now, with both players having earned their money, only 28 percent of the Annikas took from Zelda. Fully two-thirds of the Annikas neither gave nor took a penny.
So what had John List done, and what does it mean?
He upended the conventional wisdom on altruism by introducing new elements to a clever lab experiment to make it look a bit more like the real world. If your only option in the lab is to give away some money, you probably will. But in the real world, that is rarely your only option. The final version of his experiment, with the envelope-stuffing, was perhaps most compelling. It suggests that when a person comes into some money honestly and believes that another person has done the same, she neither gives away what she earned nor takes what doesn’t belong to her.
But what about all the prizewinning behavioral economists who had identified altruism in the wild?
“I think it’s pretty clear that most people are misinterpreting their data,” List says. “To me, these experiments put the knife in it. It’s certainly not altruism we’ve been seeing.”
List had painstakingly worked his way up from truck driver’s son to the center of an elite group of scholars who were rewriting the rules of economic behavior. Now, in order to stay true to his scientific principles, he had to betray them. As word of his findings began to trickle out, he suddenly became, as he puts it, “clearly the most hated guy in the field.”
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 sophomores who volunteer to participate 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 participate 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 participate. 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 participate 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 washing 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 surreptitiously 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 sophomore, 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 participants 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 cockeyed 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 circumstance, 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 participants 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 assist 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 1961–62 study designed to understand why Nazi 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 sadistically 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 scholarship, 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.
The thirty-eight witnesses who watched Kitty Genovese’s brutal murder come to mind. What’s so puzzling about this case is how little altruism was required for someone to have called the police from the safety of his or her home. That’s why the same question—how could those people have acted so horribly?—has lingered all these years.
But perhaps there’s a better question: did they act so horribly?
The foundation for nearly everything ever written or said about Genovese’s murder was that provocative New York Times article, which wasn’t published until two weeks after the crime. It had been conceived at a lunch between two men: A.M. Rosenthal, the paper’s metro editor, and Michael Joseph Murphy, the city’s police commissioner.
Genovese’s killer, Winston Moseley, was already under arrest and had confessed to the crime. The story wasn’t big news, especially in the Times. It was just another murder, way out in Queens, not the kind of thing the paper of record gave much space.
Strangely, though, Moseley also confessed to a second murder even though the police had already arrested a different man for that crime.
“What about that double confession out in Queens?” Rosenthal asked Murphy at lunch. “What’s that story all about anyway?”
Instead of answering, Murphy changed the subject.
“That Queens story is something else,” he said, and then told Rosenthal that thirty-eight people had watched Kitty Genovese be murdered without calling the police.
“Thirty-eight?” Rosenthal asked.
“Yes, thirty-eight,” Murphy said. “I’ve been in this business a long time, but this beats everything.”
Rosenthal, as he later wrote, “was sure that the Commissioner was exaggerating.” If so, Murphy may have had sufficient incentive. A story about two men arrested for the same murder clearly had the potential to embarrass the police. Furthermore, given the prolonged and brutal nature of the Genovese murder, the police may have been touchy about who caught the blame. Why hadn’t they been able to stop it?
Despite Rosenthal’s skepticism, he sent Martin Gansberg, a longtime copy editor who’d recently become a reporter, to Kew Gardens. Four days later, one of the most indelible first sentences in newspaper history appeared on the Times’s front page:
For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.
For a brand-new reporter like Gansberg and an ambitious editor like Rosenthal—he later wrote a book, Thirty-Eight Witnesses, about the case and became the Times’s top editor—it was an unqualified blockbuster. It isn’t often that a pair of lowly newspapermen can tell a tale that will set the public agenda, for decades hence, on a topic as heady as civic apathy. So they certainly had strong incentives to tell the story.
But was it true?
The best person to answer that question may be Joseph De May Jr., a sixty-year-old maritime lawyer who lives in Kew Gardens. He has an open face, thinning black hair, hazel eyes, and a hearty disposition. On a brisk Sunday morning not long ago, he gave us a tour of the neighborhood.
“Now the first attack occurred roughly in here,” he said, pausing on the sidewalk in front of a small shop on Austin Street. “And Kitty parked her car over there, in the train station parking lot,” he said, gesturing to an area perhaps thirty-five yards away.
The neighborhood has changed little since the crime. The buildings, streets, sidewalks, and parking areas remain as they were. The Mowbray, a well-kept brick apartment house, still stands across the street from the scene of the first attack.
De May moved to the neighborhood in 1974, a decade after Genovese was killed. The murder wasn’t something he thought about much. Several years ago, De May, a member of the local historical society, built a website devoted to Kew Gardens history. After a time, he felt he should add a section about the Genovese murder, since it was the only reason Kew Gardens was known to the outside world, if it was known at all.
As he gathered old photographs and news clippings, he began to find discrepancies with the official Genovese history. The more intently he reconstructed the crime, chasing down legal documents and interviewing old-timers, the more convinced he became that the legendary story of the thirty-eight apathetic witnesses was—well, a bit too heavy on legend. Like the lawyer he is, De May dissected the Times article and identified six factual errors in the first paragraph alone.
The lege
nd held that thirty-eight people “remained at their windows in fascination” and “watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks” but “not one person telephoned the police during the assault.”
The real story, according to De May, went more like this:
The first attack occurred at about 3:20 A.M., when most people were asleep. Genovese cried out for help when Moseley stabbed her in the back. This awoke some Mowbray tenants, who rushed to their windows.
The sidewalk was not well lit, so it may have been hard to make sense of what was happening. As Moseley later testified, “[I]t was late at night and I was pretty sure that nobody could see that well out of the window.” What someone likely would have seen at that point was a man standing over a woman on the ground.
At least one Mowbray tenant, a man, shouted out the window: “Leave that girl alone!” This prompted Moseley to run back to his car, which was parked less than a block away. “I could see that she had gotten up and wasn’t dead,” Moseley testified. He backed his car down the street, he said, to obscure his license plate.
Genovese struggled to her feet and slowly made her way around to the back of the building, toward her apartment’s entrance. But she didn’t make it all the way, collapsing inside the vestibule of a neighboring apartment.
Roughly ten minutes after the first attack, Moseley returned. It is unclear how he tracked her in the dark; he may have followed a trail of blood. He attacked her again inside the vestibule, then fled for good.
The Times article, as with most crime articles, especially of that era, relied heavily on information given by the police. At first the police said Moseley attacked Genovese three separate times, so that is what the newspaper published. But only two attacks occurred. (The police eventually corrected this but, as in a game of Telephone, the error took on a life of its own.)
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