Is Altruism Sensitive to Scope? The Role of Tangibility

摘要

With advances in technology, there has been an increasing separation between individuals' actions and their consequences for other people. For example, following centuries during which combat was hand-to-hand, combatants have grown ever-more distant from one another, beginning with the separation provided by guns, to bombs dropped from airplanes, and culminating in intercontinental missiles. On the prosocial side, charity has come to be applied to populations that are progressively more remote from donors. Once a local affair consisting mainly of in-kind donations to individuals in one's own community, currently much if not most charity occurs across national boundaries and takes the form of monetary donations spent by NGOs in ways that are often opaque to donors.1This remoteness and lack of tangibility matters. It has been argued that the increasing separation of combatants from one another, as well as from civilians, has increased the level of brutality in conflicts (Glover 1999; but see Pinker 2012). Likewise, considerable research suggeststhat the increasing remoteness and anonymity of people in need of help has decreased generosity (Small and Loewenstein 2003). Considerable research has also shown that people tend to behave more selfishly and less ethically when they act through delegates (Hamman, Loewenstein, and Weber 2010), and that third parties hold those who behave selfishly via proxies less accountable than those who do so directly (Bartling and Fischbacher 2012); people behave more selfishly, and are less blamed for doing so, when they get other people to do their "dirty work" for them.