Flashback to 1964. A 28 year old woman named Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death. The crime soon became infamous, not because the assailant was a psychopath, but because of an article published in the New York Times which began like this,
“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…Not one person telephoned the police during the assault; one witness called after the woman was dead.”
The incident so deeply shook the nation that over the next 20 years, it inspired more academic research on bystander apathy than the Holocaust.
Most of us, most of us believe that all humans do is in line with their self-interest. It’s the reason economists use ‘Homo economicus’ as a word play on ‘homo sapiens’ ; which is a term used for the portrayal of humans as agents who are consistently rational and narrowly self-interested.
As a society, we’ve come to accept that some bad apples will commit crimes. But we’ve all come across acts of altruism, large and small, just about every day. So why didn’t a single person exhibit altruism on that night in Queens? Does our apathy run so deep?
A question like this may seem beyond the domain of economics. But around this time, a few quisling economists had begun to care deeply about these things. But how? How can we know whether an act is altruistic? When a donor gives millions to his alma mater, is it because he really cares about the pursuit of knowledge or just because he gets his name plastered on the stadium?
Sorting through these things in the real world is extremely hard. In time, they took a different approach: since altruism is so hard to measure in the real world, why not bring the subject into the lab?
These new experiments typically took the form of a game. Let’s break it down. There are two players, who remain anonymous to each other and are given a one-time chance to split a sum of money. Player 1(let’s call her Robin) is given $20 and is instructed to offer any amount, from $0 to $20, to Player 2 (let’s call her Kate). Kate decides whether to accept or reject. If she accepts, they split, if she rejects, both of them walk home with nothing.
So according to the maxim, “Something is better than nothing”, the strategy seemed kind of obvious, that the Kates will accept any amount, even a penny. But that’s not how normal people played the game. The Kates usually rejected offers below $3 (they were apparently very disgusted). Not that lowball offers happened very often. On average, the Robins offered more than $6, largely meant to ward off rejection.
Does that make it altruism? Probably not.
Enter, a new and ingenious variant of this game, called Dictator. Same rules, just that only Robin can make the decision(the reason it’s called Dictator). Robin was given a choice to either split $20 right down the middle, or keep $18 and give the rest $2 to Kate.
The odds are that you would…divide the money evenly. Yes! That’s what 3 out of 4 participants did in the first Dictator experiments. The message couldn’t have been much clearer: people indeed seemed to be hardwired for altruism.
Let’s not form our opinions so soon. We will now see the experiments of one of the most prolific economists among the new generation, John List. He set to definitively determine if people were altruistic by nature because of his own personal encounters. He chose the same tool, Dictator, but tried different versions of the game.
The first was classic Dictator. 70% of the Robins gave money to the Kates. The findings were perfectly in line with typical Dictator findings, and perfectly consistent with altruism.
In the second version, he gave another option to Robin, she could still give the Kate any amount of money but if she preferred, she could instead take $1 from Kate. If dictators were altruistic, this expansion in the choice set shouldn’t matter at all, except for those who would’ve otherwise given nothing. But now only 35% of the Robins gave any money to the Kates, 45% didn’t give a penny while 20% took money from Kate.
What happened to all the altruism?
List didn’t stop there. In the third version, Robin was told that Kate had been given the same amount of money, and that she could steal Kate’s entire payment or give any portion of her own money. 10% of Robins gave money, while more than 60% took from Kate.( more than 40% took all of Kate’s money).
The fourth version was identical to the third, except that now they had to work for that money. Here, only 28% robins took from Kate, and fully 2/3rds neither gave nor took a penny. 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. He upended the conventional wisdom on altruism by introducing new elements to a clever lab experiment to make it look more like the real world.
But what about all those award-winning economists who identified altruism in the wild? Let’s consider the forces that make lab stories unbelievable.
First being selection bias, people who volunteer to play Dictator are usually more cooperative than average. If you’re not a do-gooder, you simply don’t participate in the experiment.
Another factor that pollutes lab experiment is scrutiny. Do you cuss in front of the principal? Thought not. How does scrutiny affect the Dictator game though? Imagine you’re a student—a junior—who volunteered to play. There’s a professor sitting in the background, just to record the choices. The stakes are low, just $20, and you got that just for showing up.(basically, for free). Now you’re asked if you’d like to give any of that money to another person who didn’t get $20 for free. You may not like this particular professor—you may even abhor him— but no one wants to look cheap in front of somebody else. What the hell, you decide, I’ll give away a few dollars. But even a stupid optimist wouldn’t call that altruism.
The other is context. We act as we do because, given the choices and incentives at play in a particular situation, it seems most productive that way. The lab context was unavoidably artificial.
When you look at the world through the eyes of the economist John List, you realise that many seemingly altruistic acts no longer seem altruistic. You give not because you want to help but because it makes you look good, feel good, or perhaps feel less bad. 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 behaviour? Absolutely. Are they also capable of heartless acts of apathy? Absolutely.
The 38 witnesses who watched Kitty Genovese’s brutal murder come to mind. How little altruism was required for someone to have just called the police. How could they have acted so horribly?
Or did they act so horribly?
The foundation for nearly everything written or said about the Genovese murder was that provocative article, which wasn’t published two weeks after the crime. It had been conceived at a lunch between 2 men: the editor and the police commissioner.
The assailant, Moseley, had also confessed to another person for which the police had arrested another man. The commissioner abruptly changed the topic and then casually mentioned about 38 witnesses who watched the murder without calling. Both of them had their incentives, the police wouldn’t want the double confession to be reported (which would question the ability and embarrass the police) and the editor would love to report on a topic as heady as civic apathy.
As it turns out, this wasn’t how exactly the events had taken place. 6 factual errors were found in the first paragraph of the article. The times article relied heavily on the information given by the police, it reported 3 separate attacks, but only two attacks occurred. In fact, the second attack occurred in an enclosed vestibule, out of view of anyone who might have seen the first attack. Who then were the ‘thirty eight witnesses’? One of the neighbours, did call the police, after he saw the first attack (which occurred in the middle of the night on a darkened sidewalk) but the police response was slow. He reasoned with the fact that what he described was not a murder in progress rather a domestic disturbance, and the police don’t put down their donuts as fast as if it were to come across a homicide call. Not to mention, the way Moseley was arrested. Few days later after the murder, Moseley was seen carrying a TV belonging to a family named Bannister and loading it into his car. A neighbour approached him and asked what was he doing. he said he was helping the bannisters move, which on phoning, the neighbour confirmed was not true. He called the police and under interrogation, Moseley admitted his crime.
Which means that a man who became infamous because he murdered a woman whose neighbours didn’t intervene was ultimately captured because of… a neighbour’s intervention.
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