分度值新发展大学英语阅读与写作4课文翻译Looking good by doing good寻找好行善

2021年1月21日发(作者：梁小斌)
Looking good by doing good[Jan 15th 2009]
Economics focus

Looking good by doing good
Jan 15th 2009
From
The Economist
print edition
Rewarding people for their generosity may be counterproductive
Illustration by Jac Depczyk
A LARGE
plaque

in the
foyer
of Boston
’
s Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA), a museum housed in a
dramatic glass and metal building on the harbour
’
s edge, identifies its most generous
patron
s. Visitors who stop to look will notice that some donors
—
including two who gave
the ICA over $$2.5m
—
have chosen not to reveal their names. Such
reticence
is unusual:
less than 1% of private gifts to charity are anonymous. Most people (including the vast
majority of the ICA
’
s patrons) want their good deeds to be talked about. In
“
Richistan
”
,
a book on America
’
s
new rich
, Robert Frank writes of the several society publications in
Florida
’
s
Palm
Beach
which
exist
largely
to
publicise

the
charity
of
its
well- heeled

residents (at least before Bernard Madoff
’
s alleged Ponzi scheme left some of them with
little left to give).
As
it
turns
out,
the
distinction
between
private
and
public
generosity
is
helpful
in
understanding
what
motivates
people
to
give money
to
charities
or donate
blood,
acts
which are costly to the doer and primarily benefit others. Such actions are widespread, and
growing. The $$306 billion that Americans gave to charity in 2007 was more than triple the
amount donated in 1965. And though a big chunk of this comes from
plutocrat
s like Bill
Gates
and
Warren
Buffett,
whose
philanthropy

has
attracted
much
attention,
modest
earners also give generously of their time and money. A 2001 survey found that 89% of
American households gave to charity, and that 44% of adults volunteered the equivalent of
9m full-time jobs.
Tax break
s explain some of the kindness of strangers. But by no means
all.
Economists, who tend to think
self-interest
governs most actions of man, are
intrigue
d,
and have identified several reasons to explain good deeds of this kind. Tax breaks are, of
course, one of the main ones, but donors are also sometimes paid directly for their pains,
and the mere thought of a thank-you letter can be enough to persuade others to
cough
up
. Some even act out of sheer
altruism
. But most interesting is another explanation,
which is that people do good in part because it makes them look good to those whose
opinions they care about. Economists call this
“
image motivation
”
.
Dan Ariely of Duke University, Anat Bracha of Tel Aviv University, and Stephan Meier of
Columbia
University
sought,
through
experiments,
to
test
the
importance
of
image
motivation, as well as to gain
insights into
how different motivating factors interact. Their
results, which they report in a new paper
*
, suggest that image motivation matters a lot, at
least in the laboratory. Even more intriguingly, they find evidence that monetary incentives
can actually reduce charitable giving when people are driven in part by a desire to look
good in others
’
eyes.
The crucial thing about charity as a means of image building is, of course, that it can work
only
if
others
know
about
it
and
think
positively
of
the
charity
in
question
.
So,
the
academics argue, people should give more when their actions are public.
To test this, they conducted an experiment where the number of times participants clicked
an awkward combination of computer keys determined how much money was donated on
their behalf to the American Red Cross. Since 92% of participants thought highly of the
Red Cross, giving to it could reasonably be assumed to make people look good to their
peers. People were randomly assigned to either a private group, where only the participant
knew the amount of the donation, or a public group, where the participant had to stand up
at the end of the session and share this information with the group. Consistent with the
hypothesis that image mattered, participants exerted much greater effort in the public case:
the average number of clicks, at 900, was nearly double the average of 517 clicks in the
private case.
However
, the academics wanted to go a step further
. In this, they were influenced by the
theoretical model of two economists, Roland Benabou, of Princeton University, and Jean
Tirole,
of
Toulouse
University
’
s
Institut
d
’
Economie
Industrielle,
who
formalised
the
idea that if people do good to look good, introducing monetary or other rewards into the
mix might complicate matters. An observer who sees someone getting paid for donating
blood,
for
example,
would
find
it
hard
to
differentiate
between
the
donor
’
s
intrinsic
“
goodness
”
and his
greed
.

Blood money
The idea that monetary incentives could be counterproductive has
been around
at least
since
1970,
when
Richard
Titmuss,
a
British
social
scientist,
hypothesised
that
paying
people to donate blood would reduce the amount of blood that they gave. But Mr Ariely
and his colleagues demonstrate a mechanism through which such
confound
ing effects
could operate. They presumed that the addition of a monetary incentive should have much
less of an impact in public (where it
muddle
s the image signal of an action) than in private
(where the image is not important). By adding a monetary reward for participants to their