The Fear Factor

by Abigail Marsh

  In Europe, the homicide rate today: Steven Pinker, “A History of Violence: Edge Master Class 2011,” September 27, 2011, https://www.edge.org/conversation/steven_pinker-a-history-of-violence-edge-master-class-2011.

  Mauritania’s abolition of slavery in 1980: Ibid.

  only a minority of polled Americans: “The Death Penalty, Nearing Its End” (editorial), New York Times, October 24, 2016.

  no war zones anywhere in the Western Hemisphere: Greg Myre, “How Castro’s Rise and Death Bookend 60 Years of Latin American Wars,” NPR, September 27, 2016, http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/09/27/495522306/guess-what-as-of-today-the-western-hemisphere-has-no-wars.

  a majority of Americans have reported: Pew Research Center, “Public Perception of Crime Rate at Odds with Reality,” April 16, 2015, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/04/17/despite-lower-crime-rates-support-for-gun-rights-increases/ft_15-04-01_guns_crimerate/.

  Although youth violence and delinquency: Will Dahlgreen, “British Public Unaware of Improvement in Youth Behaviour,” March 3, 2015, YouGovUK, https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/03/03/british-public-unaware-revolution-youth-behaviour/.

  especially biased toward focusing on bad things: Roy F. Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Catrin Finkenauer, and Kathleen D. Vohs, “Bad Is Stronger Than Good,” Review of General Psychology 5, no. 4 (2001): 323.

  we generally pay more attention to bad events: For compelling examples of this phenomenon, see Joop Van der Pligt and J. Richard Eiser, “Negativity and Descriptive Extremity in Impression Formation,” European Journal of Social Psychology 10, no. 4 (1980): 415–419; Nicole C. Baltazar, Kristin Shutts, and Katherine D. Kinzler, “Children Show Heightened Memory for Threatening Social Actions,” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 112, no. 1 (2012): 102–110.

  a romantic relationship must be marked: Ellie Lisitsa, “The Positive Perspective: Dr. Gottman’s Magic Ratio!” Gottman Institute, December 5, 2012, https://www.gottman.com/blog/the-positive-perspective-dr-gottmans-magic-ratio.

  the worse the action, the more likely: Susan T. Fiske, “Attention and Weight in Person Perception: The Impact of Negative and Extreme Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 38 (1980): 889–906.

  And so, by some estimates: Ray Williams, “Why We Love Bad News More Than Good News,” Psychology Today, November 1, 2014, https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201411/why-we-love-bad-news-more-good-news; Marc Trussler and Stuart Soroka, “Consumer Demand for Cynical and Negative News Frames,” International Journal of Press/Politics 19, no. 3 (2014): 360–379.

  the mistaken but common belief that the world is dangerous: Moran Bodas, Maya Siman-Tov, Kobi Peleg, and Zahava Solomon, “Anxiety-Inducing Media: The Effect of Constant News Broadcasting on the Well-being of Israeli Television Viewers,” Psychiatry 78, no. 3 (2015): 265–276; Sean Patrick Roche, Justin T. Pickett, and Marc Gertz, “The Scary World of Online News? Internet News Exposure and Public Attitudes Toward Crime and Justice,” Journal of Quantitative Criminology 32, no. 2 (2016): 215–236; Sara Tiegreen and Elana Newman, “Violence: Comparing Reporting and Reality,” Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma, February 18, 2009, http://dartcenter.org/content/violence-comparing-reporting-and-reality.

  The word “epidemic” frequently crops up: Peter Moore, “Does America Have a Rape Culture?” YouGovUS, December 11, 2014, https://today.yougov.com/news/2014/12/11/rape-culture.

  rates of sexual assault are decreasing, not increasing: “Yes Means Yes, Says Mr. Brown,” The Economist, October 3, 2014; Sofi Sinozich and Lynn Langton, “Rape and Sexual Assault Among College-Age Females, 1995–2013,” NCJ 248471 (Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, December 11, 2014), http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=5176.

  About half of the respondents reported: Common Cause Foundation, Perceptions Matter: The Common Cause UK Values Survey (London: Common Cause Foundation, 2016). The findings of the survey are also broadly consistent with findings of the recent laboratory study by Ben M. Tappin and Ryan T. McKay, “The Illusion of Moral Superiority,” Social Psychological and Personality Science (2016): 1–9.

  Think, for example, of Anne Frank: Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 333; “In Our Opinion: Nelson Mandela Left Legacy of Freedom and Faith” (editorial), Deseret News, December 5, 2013; Mazhar Kibriya, Gandhi and Indian Freedom Struggle (New Delhi: APH Publishing, 1999), 20; Martin Luther King Jr., Nobel acceptance speech, December 10, 1964, Nobelprize.org, https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1964/king-acceptance_en.html. A little later in King’s speech, he predicted that goodness would be the rule of the land when “the lion and the lamb shall lie down together.” And as you have seen, they have.

  the beliefs of Richard Ramirez, the notorious serial murderer: Vojtech Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 128; Mark Thomas, The Deadliest War: The Story of World War II (Berlin, NJ: Townsend Press, 2011); International Encyclopedia of Public Health, vol. 1, 2nd ed., edited by Stella R. Quah and William Cockerham (Waltham, MA: Elsevier), 467.

  Starting from an assumption of others’ trustworthiness: Robert M. Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 2006). The relationship between trust and cooperation is undeniably complex. Just as trust can lead to cooperation, so can cooperation lead to trust; see Alexander Peysakhovich and David G. Rand, “Habits of Virtue: Creating Norms of Cooperation and Defection in the Laboratory,” Management Science 62, no. 3 (2013): 631–647.

  In one computer simulation study we conducted: Kristin M. Brethel-Haurwitz, Sarah A. Stoycos, Elise M. Cardinale, Bryce Huebner, and Abigail A. Marsh, “Is Costly Punishment Altruistic? Exploring Rejection of Unfair Offers in the Ultimatum Game in Real-World Altruists,” Scientific Reports 6 (2016): 18974.

  the social discounting task: Bryan Jones and Howard Rachlin, “Social Discounting,” Psychological Science 17, no. 4 (2006): 283–286.

  This pattern holds up across multiple studies: Howard Rachlin and Bryan A. Jones, “Social Discounting and Delay Discounting,” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 21 (2008): 29–43; Qingguo Ma, Guanxiong Pei, and Jia Jin, “What Makes You Generous? The Influence of Rural and Urban Rearing on Social Discounting in China,” PLoS One 10, no. 7 (2015): e0133078; Tina Strombach, Jia Jin, Bernd Weber, Peter H. Kenning, Qiang Shen, Qingguo Ma, and Tobias Kalenscher, “Charity Begins at Home: Cultural Differences in Social Discounting and Generosity,” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 27, no. 3 (2014): 235–245.

  Their generosity had dropped by less than half: Kruti M. Vekaria, Kristin M. Brethel-Haurwitz, Elise M. Cardinale, Sarah A. Stoycos, and Abigail A. Marsh, “Social Discounting and Distance Perceptions in Costly Altruism,” Nature Human Behaviour (2017).

  as the philosopher Peter Singer and others have put it: Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology (Oxford: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 1981).

  Reciprocal altruism is the closest: Gabriele Bellucci, Sergey V. Chernyak, Kimberly Goodyear, Simon B. Eickhoff, and Frank Krueger, “Neural Signatures of Trust in Reciprocity: A Coordinate-Based Meta-Analysis,” Human Brain Mapping (2016), DOI: 10.1002/hbm.23451; James K. Rilling and Alan G. Sanfey, “The Neuroscience of Social Decision-Making,” Annual Review of Psychology 62 (2011): 23–48.

  altruistic kidney donors overwhelmingly report: Sadler et al., “The Living, Genetically Unrelated, Kidney Donor”; Stothers, Gourlay, and Liu, “Attitudes and Predictive Factors for Live Kidney Donation.”

  My colleague David Rand, a behavioral scientist: David G. Rand, “Cooperation, Fast and Slow: Meta-Analytic Evidence for a Theory of Social Heuristics and Self-Interested Deliberation,” Psychological Science 27, no. 9 (2016): 1192–1206.

  urges to care and cooperate are deeply rooted: David G. Rand and Ziv G. Epstein, “Risking Your Life Without a Second Thought: Intuitive Decision-Making and Extreme Altruism,” PLoS One 9, no. 10 (2014): e109687.

  its a
dvocates’ explicit aim: From the website effectivealtruism.org: “Effective altruism is changing the way we do good. Effective altruism is about answering one simple question: how can we use our resources to help others the most? Rather than just doing what feels right, we use evidence and careful analysis to find the very best causes to work on.”

  quickly spiral into a vortex of indecision: For thoughtful critiques of effective altruism, see Dylan Matthews, “I Spent a Week at Google Talking with Nerds About Charity. I Came Away… Worried,” Vox, August 10, 2015, http://www.vox.com/2015/8/10/9124145/effective-altruism-global-ai; Eric Posner, “Should Charity Be Logical?” Slate, March 26, 2015, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/view_from_chicago/2015/03/effective_altruism_critique_few_charities_stand_up_to_rational_evaluation.html; Jamil Zaki, “The Feel-Good School of Philanthropy,” New York Times, December 5, 2015.

  Such injuries leave IQ and reasoning ability intact: Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error (New York: Random House, 2006); Edmund T. Rolls and Fabien Grabenhorst, “The Orbitofrontal Cortex and Beyond: From Affect to Decision-Making,” Progress in Neurobiology 86, no. 3 (2008): 216–244.

  “There is a wholly fallacious theory”: Bertrand Russell, “What Desires Are Politically Important?” (Nobel lecture), December 11, 1950, nobelprize.org, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1950/russell-lecture.html.

  Consider the case of Robert Mather: Derek Thompson, “The Greatest Good,” The Atlantic, June 15, 2015.

  the amount of suffering and misery: For graphs showing these changes and many others, see Max Roser, “Life Expectancy,” Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy.

  The economic historian Joel Mokyr: Ana Swanson, “Why the Industrial Revolution Didn’t Happen in China,” Washington Post, October 28, 2016.

  The World Bank estimates: The World Bank, “World Monitoring Report 2015/2016,” http://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/global-monitoring-report.

  We ran a number of analyses to probe: Kristin M. Brethel-Haurwitz and Abigail A. Marsh, “Geographical Differences in Subjective Well-being Predict Extraordinary Altruism,” Psychological Science 25 (2014): 762–771.

  The psychologists Elizabeth Dunn and Mike Norton: Lara B. Aknin, Christopher P. Barrington-Leigh, Elizabeth W. Dunn, John F. Helliwell, Justine Burns, Robert Biswas-Diener, Imelda Kemeza, Paul Nyende, Claire E. Ashton-James, and Michael I. Norton, “Prosocial Spending and Well-being: Cross-Cultural Evidence for a Psychological Universal,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 104, no. 4 (2013): 635–652; Lara B. Aknin, Elizabeth W. Dunn, and Michael I. Norton, “Happiness Runs in a Circular Motion: Evidence for a Positive Feedback Loop Between Prosocial Spending and Happiness,” Journal of Happiness Studies 13 (2012): 347–355.

  One 2005 Gallup poll found a linear relationship: Carroll, “Americans More Likely to Donate Money”; see also Jesus Ramirez-Valles, “Volunteering in Public Health: An Analysis of Volunteers’ Characteristics and Activities,” International Journal of Volunteer Administration 24, no. 2 (2006): 15–24.

  Another large study found similar results: Paul B. Reed and L. Kevin Selbee, “The Civic Core in Canada: Disproportionality in Charitable Giving, Volunteering, and Civic Participation,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 30, no. 4 (2001): 761–780.

  A field experiment in Ireland: Antonio S. Silva and Ruth Mace, “Cooperation and Conflict: Field Experiments in Northern Ireland,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 281, no. 1792 (2014): 20141435; Jo Holland, Antonio S. Silva, and Ruth Mace, “Lost Letter Measure of Variation in Altruistic Behaviour in 20 Neighbourhoods,” PLoS One 7, no. 8 (2012): e43294; David Sloan Wilson, Daniel Tumminelli O’Brien, and Artura Sesma, “Human Prosociality from an Evolutionary Perspective: Variation and Correlations at a City-Wide Scale,” Evolution and Human Behavior 30, no. 3 (2009): 190–200.

  The positive relationship between well-being and altruism: Sebastian Prediger, Björn Vollan, and Benedikt Herrmann, “Resource Scarcity, Spite and Cooperation,” Working Papers in Economics and Statistics 2013-10, University of Innsbruck, 2013; Yu-Kang Lee and Chun-Tuan Chang, “Who Gives What to Charity? Characteristics Affecting Donation Behavior,” Social Behavior and Personality: An International Journal 35, no. 9 (2007): 1173–1180.

  Many decades of research on misanthropy: Tom W. Smith, “Factors Relating to Misanthropy in Contemporary American Society,” Social Science Research 26, no. 2 (1997): 170–196.

  To be fair, some recent studies: Paul K. Piff, Daniel M. Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner, “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences United States of America 109, no. 11 (2012): 4086–4091; Paul K. Piff, Michael W. Kraus, Stéphane Côté, Bonnie Hayden Cheng, and Dacher Keltner, “Having Less, Giving More: The Influence of Social Class on Prosocial Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 99, no. 5 (2010): 771–84.

  The study was conducted by the German psychologist: Martin Korndörfer, Boris Egloff, and Stefan C. Schmukle, “A Large Scale Test of the Effect of Social Class on Prosocial Behavior,” PLoS One 10, no. 7 (2015): e0133193.

  despite the fact that wealthier individuals: Derek Thompson, “The Free-Time Paradox in America,” The Atlantic, September 13, 2016; “Why Is Everyone So Busy?” The Economist, December 20, 2015.

  Prosperity within a culture tends to be associated: Patricia M. Greenfield, “The Changing Psychology of Culture from 1800 Through 2000,” Psychological Science 24, no. 9 (2013): 1722–1731; Pamela L. Cox, Barry A. Friedman, and Thomas Tribunella, “Relationships Among Cultural Dimensions, National Gross Domestic Product, and Environmental Sustainability,” Journal of Applied Business and Economics 12, no. 6 (2011): 46; Ronald Inglehart and Wayne E. Baker, “Modernization, Cultural Change, and the Persistence of Traditional Values,” American Sociological Review (2000): 19–51; Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature.

  Collectivism entails focusing on and valuing interdependence: Nicholas Sorensen and Daphna Oyserman, “Collectivism, Effects on Relationships,” May 2, 2011, in Encyclopedia of Human Relationships (Sage Publications, 2009), http://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/783/docs/sorensen_oyserman_2009.pdf.

  Analyses of cultural values across nations: Cox, Friedman, and Tribunella, “Relationships Among Cultural Dimensions,” 46; Linghui Tang and Peter E. Koveos, “A Framework to Update Hofstede’s Cultural Value Indices: Economic Dynamics and Institutional Stability,” Journal of International Business Studies 39, no. 6 (2008): 1045–1063; Henri C. Santos, Michael E. W. Varnum, and Igor Grossmann, “Global Increases in Individualism,” Psychological Science (2017): in press.

  one recent study found that over the last 200 years: Greenfield, “The Changing Psychology of Culture from 1800 Through 2000.”

  the recent period of incredible economic growth in China: Liza G. Steele and Scott M. Lynch, “The Pursuit of Happiness in China: Individualism, Collectivism, and Subjective Well-being During China’s Economic and Social Transformation,” Social Indicators Research 114, no. 2 (2013): 441–451.

  This effect may be bidirectional: Igor Grossmann and Michael E. W. Varnum, “Social Structure, Infectious Diseases, Disasters, Secularism, and Cultural Change in America,” Psychological Science 26, no. 3 (2015): 311–324; Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Gérard Roland, “Individualism, Innovation, and Long-Run Growth,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences United States of America 108, suppl. 4 (2011): 21316–21319.

  traditional Confucian teachings emphasize: Wilbur A. Lam and Laurence B. McCullough, “Influence of Religious and Spiritual Values on the Willingness of Chinese-Americans to Donate Organs for Transplantation,” Clinical Transplantation 14, no. 5 (2000): 449–456; Andrew Ma, “Comparison of the Origins of Altruism as Leadership Value Between Chinese and Christian Cultures,” Leadership Advance Online XVI (2009).

  “Fijians do games that involve giving”: Quoted in Bob Holmes, “Generous by Nature
,” New Scientist 231, no. 3086 (2016): 26–28.

  An emphasis on group bonds requires: Anu Realo, Jüri Allik, and Brenna Greenfield, “Radius of Trust: Social Capital in Relation to Familism and Institutional Collectivism,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 39, no. 4 (2008): 447–462; Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Gérard Roland, “Understanding the Individualism-Collectivism Cleavage and Its Effects: Lessons from Cultural Psychology,” in Institutions and Comparative Economic Development, edited by Masahiko Aoki, Timur Kuran, and Gérard Roland, 213–236 (Berlin: Springer, 2012); André Van Hoorn, “Individualist-Collectivist Culture and Trust Radius: A Multilevel Approach,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 46, no. 2 (2015): 269–276. For interesting real-world implications, see “The Unkindness of Strangers,” The Economist, July 27, 2013.

  Collectivism is associated with low levels: Mie Kito, Masaki Yuki, and Robert Thomson, “Relational Mobility and Close Relationships: A Socioecological Approach to Explain Cross-Cultural Differences,” Personal Relationships 24, no. 1 (2017): 114–130; Masaki Yuki and Joanna Schug, “Relational Mobility: A Socioecological Approach to Personal Relationships,” in Relationship Science: Integrating Evolutionary, Neuroscience, and Sociocultural Approaches, edited by Omri Gillath, Glenn Adams, and Adrianne Kunkel, 137–151 (Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 2012).

  when the wider culture paints members of an outgroup: Brad Pinter and Anthony G. Greenwald, “A Comparison of Minimal Group Induction Procedures,” Group Processes Intergroup Relations 14 (2011): 81–98; Mina Cikara, Emile G. Bruneau, and Rebecca R. Saxe, “Us and Them: Intergroup Failures of Empathy,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 20 (2011): 149–153; Jonathan Levy, Abraham Goldstein, Moran Influs, Shafiq Masalha, Orna Zagoory-Sharon, and Ruth Feldman, “Adolescents Growing Up Amidst Intractable Conflict Attenuate Brain Response to Pain of Outgroup,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences United States of America 113, no. 48 (2016): 13696–13701.