😈 How Kind People Exploit the Masses

Why we're generous to individuals but mean to groups

Feb 6, 2022

We’re never short of national scandals to talk about. Stories of CEOs quietly harming customers for profit, rich people exploiting poor people, and politicians cheating the masses for personal gain seem to be in the news on a regular basis (on that note, here’s a New York Times piece from Jan 22 quoting my writing on the science of hypocrisy and relating it to Boris Johnson).

The prevalence of all this selfishness might seem a little strange because it’s rare that we meet an outright sociopath in real life. When talking to people on a personal level, they generally appear to be good people trying to live their lives without hurting others.

So it could be that there are many sociopaths living among us who are excellent at hiding their antisocial tendencies. Or it could be that we’re all somewhat sociopathic given the right conditions. A new study finds truth in the latter idea. It turns out that most people will act generously in one-on-one interactions while simultaneously exploiting large groups of people.

🦹 Kind to one, evil to many

Economic games are common in experimental psychology. They usually involve pairing people in one-on-one social interactions, assigning each person a role, and then allowing them to split some cash. Here are a few examples:

The Dictator Game: One person in a pair is assigned the role of “dictator” and receives a pot of cash. The dictator decides how much cash to give to the other person, and the other person simply has to take it!
The Ultimatum Game: One person in a pair is assigned the role of “proposer” and receives a pot of cash. The proposer decides how much cash to offer the other person, but if the other person rejects the offer, they both get nothing.
The Trust Game: One person in a pair is assigned the role of “trustor” and receives a pot of cash. The trustor decides how much money to give to the other person (the “trustee”), and that transferred money is then doubled by researchers. The trustee then decides how much of that doubled money they want to give back to the trustor.

These games measure kindness or “prosociality” in some form. If people were simply selfish robots trying to maximize their own payout, their most rational action in a one-shot game with no repercussions would be to keep every possible penny (in the Ultimatum Game, they might offer a very small amount of money to disincentivize rejected offers).

But people aren’t robots, and social emotions affect how they behave. For example, in one of my previous newsletters, I explained that people will often reject offers they perceive as unfair in the Ultimatum Game to punish the proposer. That means they sacrifice their own cash just to get even.

Overall, people are surprisingly generous with their initial offers in the games though. In a recent study, Alos-Ferrer and his research colleagues played out these games with hundreds of participants and found that people offer an average 21% of the cash in the Dictator Game and 42% of the cash in the Ultimatum Game (these numbers are intriguingly similar to UK tax rates!). Depending on the specific game, 60-96% of people offer at least some positive amount of money.

So in these one-on-one games, people are nice, sociable humans. But Alos-Ferrer et al. added a twist to their study. They came up with a new game called the “Big Robber Game” and asked the same people to play it. Some people were assigned to be “robbers” while others were assigned to be “victims”. The robbers had to decide what fraction of cash they wanted to steal from the research earnings of 16 victims. They could take nothing and leave with their own earnings, or they could boost their payout by stealing up to 50% of the earnings of each victim.

In contrast to behavior in the one-on-one economic games, robbers were shockingly selfish in this game. 56% of them stole everything they could by taking half of each victim’s earnings, and another 27% of them stole a third of the money. A pitiful 2% of robbers stole nothing. In hindsight, it’s a good thing the researchers set stealing limits at 50%, since a large number of victims may otherwise have gone home empty-handed.

But why this disconnect between what people do in one-on-one economic games vs the Big Robber game? Why do most people generously hand over cash in a Dictator Game while simultaneously stealing everything they can in a group-based game?

There are several theories here. The simplest is that the stakes are much higher in the Big Robber game. Gifting a small amount of your paycheck to another person isn’t a big deal but absorbing half of the earnings of 16 other people is a different ball game. A good person might become a greedy banker or corrupt politician when the payoff is big enough.

However, there’s also a difference in how we perceive individuals vs groups. Individuals have distinguishable identities, while groups are more like an anonymous mass. When it comes to charitable giving, people are more likely to donate $10 to help a single person in need than they are to donate $10 to help a larger group—a phenomenon known as “compassion fade”.

It’s easy to visualize how we can improve or harm the life of an individual person. By creating vivid mental stories about individuals, we are more likely to empathize with them in a way that makes us act altruistically. This is why the tactic of sponsoring a specific child or animal is popular among charities. It’s not so easy to envision and appreciate the multiple lives within a larger group.

In other words, we can be perfectly friendly and generous with individual people while stealing from the masses with no noticeable guilt. That’s not to say that some people aren’t more generous than others. Even the research above showed that the most extreme robbers in the Big Robber game were less generous overall in the one-on-one games. But there’s a troubling general thread running through us: Regardless of how warm and charitable we are in everyday social interactions, there’s a potentially colossal scandal waiting within us, ready to emerge as soon as it finds the opportunity.

🙏 Expecting some takeaway tips? First, a special request

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⭐️ Takeaway tips

Question your moral instincts: Our sense of morality is deeply intertwined with our emotions. Sometimes, emotions can’t give you the full picture. Good moral reasoning requires careful thought rather than a jumpy response to a feeling of disgust or rage. So don’t hesitate to ask yourself questions that touch on taboo topics or go against particular norms. In some cases, you may strengthen your existing opinion, while at others you might want to do a U-turn. Both are worthwhile and both require an unbiased analysis of how particular behaviors or policies affect global wellbeing.
Treat groups like individuals: We’re less empathetic with groups than we are with individuals, even though groups are just multiple individuals. For every joyful smile and heartbroken tear we can imagine for a single person, we should be able to imagine several more for a group, but our minds just don’t work that way. When you’re donating to a charity or deciding how to help people in your everyday life, try to weigh group wellbeing fairly against individual wellbeing. You could investigate the personal story of a random person in a group if you want to connect better with a specific group’s experience, or you could use resources that measure the objective social outcomes of your charitable donations (e.g. GiveWell).
Don’t attribute evil too quickly: Some people are more selfish than others. But when people do something wrong and we don’t have the full story, it’s important to be generous in reading the possible motivations or explanations for what happened. We often condemn people for doing things that we might have done in the same situation. Modern social media is a constant rush to judgment, but give yourself time to process everything and allow more evidence to emerge. If you’re generous rather than hostile in judging others, you’ll no doubt feel happier and more relaxed yourself.

💡 A final quote

“It is the evil that lies in ourselves that is ever least tolerant of the evil that lies in others.”

~ Maurice Maeterlinck

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👋 Until next time,

Erman Misirlisoy, PhD

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