Why We Give to Charity1

By Leon Neyfakh

Every holiday season in America, as Thanksgiving fades and turkey sandwiches give way to Christmas trees and candy canes,Americans unleash an immense flow of charitable donations.2. fade： 消失，这里指“结束”；give way to：为……所替代；candy cane： 拐棍糖，一种红白相间的拐棍形棒糖；unleash：发动；immense： 巨大的，极广大的；charitable donation： 慈善捐款。For charities, it’s the busiest time of the year.

The urge to give that is awakened around this time is an important one: Philanthropy plays a crucial role in American society, providing funding for a vast array of services.3. 如今，捐赠的冲动普遍被唤起是很重要的：慈善事业在美国社会地位举足轻重，它是大量公共服务的资金来源。awaken： 唤起，使……意识到；philanthropy： 慈善行为，慈善事业；crucial： 重要的；array： 一系列。Giving also connects us as a culture:According to a study by Indiana University, nearly two-thirds of all Americans gave to charity in 2008. American charities took in nearly$300 billion in 2010.

Underlying all those donations is a mystery: Why do we give at all?From a rational perspective,4. underlie： 引起，使发生；rational： 合理的，理性的；perspective： 观点，视角。it’s hard to see why people worried about their own families, taxes, and bills would want to give money to help strangers. Though the tradition of giving to the less fortunate has existed for millennia—and though researchers have long been interested in what makes humans want to help others at their own expense5. at one’s expense： 由某人负担费用。—social scientists have only begun to seriously examine the act of donating money in the past 20 years.

The insights they’ve drawn have been helpful to fund-raisers,enabling them to craft better campaigns and tug at our heartstrings with greater precision.6. 他们（社会科学家们）对于人们捐款心理的洞悉对筹款人很有帮助，这使得筹款人可以精心策划更有的放矢的筹款活动，也更能触动我们的心弦。insight：洞悉，深刻见解；draw： （drawn为过去分词形式）获得，得到；fund-raiser： 募捐者，筹款人；craft： 精心制作，文中指精心筹划；tug at one’s heartstring： 触动心弦；precision： 精确性。But for those of us just looking to donate, and donate well, the emerging research on charitable giving has yielded a dif ficult truth:7. emerging： 新兴的；yield： 产生。Thinking harder about how to give makes us less likely to give at all.

美国的慈善事业和美国的历史一样悠久，卡耐基的名言“在巨富中死去是一种耻辱”是对人们的慈善行为的最好诠释。而石油巨人洛克菲勒的思想也与卡耐基如出一辙，他也将“尽其所能获取，尽其所有给予”作为自己的信条。怜悯之心，人皆有之。尽管我们都是普通人，无力去彻底改变遭遇不幸的人们的处境、无力去消除他们的贫穷。但是，我们仍会为他们尽自己的一份力。

Research by economists and psychologists suggests that the impulse to give does not square with thinking in such a calculating way.8. impulse： 冲动；square with： 与……协调或一致；calculating： 精明的，深谋远虑的。On the contrary, it appears that giving is driven by emotional motives, rooted in deep impulses, cognitive biases, and even our own sel fish needs.9. 正相反，看来施与是由情感动机所驱使的，来源于强烈的心理冲动、认知偏差，甚至是我们自身自私的需求。root in： 来源于，起因于；cognitive bias： 认知偏差。And when we think too analytically about giving, we can de flate our initial generous instinct.10. analytically： 分析地，解析地；de flate： 打击，使泄气；initial： 最初的；instinct： 本能，天性。

Is it possible to be both generous and smart about it? A lot of donors11. donor： 捐赠人。would like to think so, but new research suggests that it may be harder than we realize. And while there may be things we can do to make sure our money doesn’t end up wasted, charity appears to be one area where we have to be extra-careful not to let our brains get in the way.12. brains： [常用复数]智慧，聪明；get in the way： 妨碍，阻碍。

Why anyone is ever sel fless is a mystery that has fascinated, not to mention frustrated, scientists since Charles Darwin, who considered it a major problem for his theory of natural selection.13. fascinate： 使着迷；frustrate： 挫败，使感到灰心；Charles Darwin：查尔斯·达尔文，是英国生物学家，进化论的奠基人；natural selection： 达尔文的“自然选择，优胜劣汰”理论，他认为，生存斗争及适者生存的过程，就是自然选择的过程。If every creature on earth was in competition with every other, then how to explain bees sacri ficing themselves for the good of the hive,14. for the good of： 为了……的利益；hive： 蜂巢。or men and women running into burning buildings to save the lives of strangers? These questions have led researchers to posit that helping others, even when it costs us dearly, is simply part of being successful social animals:Despite our imperative to compete, we ultimately find it pays off to be generous.15. posit： 假设，设想；dearly： 昂贵地；imperative： 必须要做的事；ultimately： 最后，终于；pay off： 得到预料的结果，获得成功。

Of course, it’s one thing to explain why people in general are inclined to16. be inclined to： 倾向于……。help others, and another to examine how it plays in the mind of an individual person. Studying charitable donation has been a valuable window into that process for researchers, because it allows them to quantify17. quantify： 量化，用数量表示。the amount of good a person is doing, and how much he or she is giving up.

One dominant thought among charity researchers is that our donations aren’t chie fly driven by concern for others, or a principled sense of altruism—that instead, it’s largely a way for us to indulge the desire to feel virtuous and happy about our role in the world.18. 慈善研究者们的一个主要想法是：我们捐款的目的并不首要出于对他人的关心或是利他主义的原则感，而是因为它满足了我们的心愿——让我们认为自己的社会角色是高尚的并感到幸福。dominant：主要的；principled： 有原则的；altruism： 利他主义；indulge： 满足，沉溺于；virtuous： 道德高尚的。This theory was formalized in 1989 by behavioral economist James Andreoni,who described the rush of self-satisfaction and sense of purpose one experiences after committing support to a worthy cause as “warm glow.”19. 这一理论于1989年由行为经济学家詹姆斯·安德里尼所创立，他将人们向高尚的事业伸出援手之后所获得的自我满足的快感和目标达成感描述为“温情效应”。formalize： 使成形；rush： 激动，快感；commit sth. to sth： 投入。The reason we give money, Andreoni wrote, is that it makes us feel good—regardless of how much it bene fits the people we’re ostensibly20. ostensibly： 表面上。trying to help.

Another prominent21. prominent： 重要的，著名的。theory to emerge from the research is that people give because of social pressure. We want to avoid appearing sel fish or coldhearted, especially in front of people who are suffering or people whose opinions we care about. We might feel this type of pressure when we find ourselves passing a homeless person on the street.

Jonathan Baron, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania,asked a group of participants which charity they’d rather give to: one that achieved its goals so ef ficiently that it could spend 20 percent of its money on advertising, or one that required more money to do the same amount of good, and thus spent less on promotion. Though the first charity was technically more ef ficient, people tended to favor the latter:What mattered to them was seeing more of their own money at work,Baron concluded, rather than the amount of good it did.

The lesson Baron took from his own research is that would-be philanthropists22. philanthropist： 慈善家。need to be more thoughtful: “People don’t ask themselves enough, ‘What is this charity actually doing, and what good does it do, and how important is that good?’” Baron has revised his own giving strategy, so that instead of spreading a number of small gifts across 10 different charities, he now focuses it on a couple of organizations that he believes will do the most with his money.

Can more of us be like Baron,and harness23. harness： 抑制，约束。our charitable impulses while making smarter decisions about where our money is going? The latest findings from psychology suggest it’s unlikely—that when it comes to giving, at least, the deliberative24. deliberative： 慎重的。thinking that’s associated with making informed choices actually makes it less likely that a person will give at all.

Small, of the Wharton School, conducted an experiment showing that when people were given more facts and statistics about the problem a charity was trying to address,25. the Wharton School： 美国宾夕法尼亚大学沃顿商学院，该学院位于费城，是世界最著名的商学院之一；address： 处理。they actually became less likely to donate. The best approach for a charity raising money to feed hungry children in Mali,26. approach： 方法；Mali： 马里，西非国家。the team found, was to simply show potential donors a photograph of a starving child and tell them her name and age. Donors who were shown more contextual information about famine in Africa—the ones who were essentially given more to think about—were less likely to give.27. contextual： 前后关系的，相关联的；famine： 饥荒；essentially： 大体上，基本上。

Small’s findings are backed up by Daniel Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton and coeditor of the book The Science of Giving, who found that simply giving people information about a charity’s overhead costs28. overhead costs： 管理费用。makes them less likely to donate to it. This held true, remarkably, even if the information was positive and indicated and the charity was extremely ef ficient.

“When we start thinking about it, we might start analyzing it,” Small said. “Is this really going to be effective? Is this going to be the best use of my money? How else might I spend my money? What happens is you stop feeling.”

For humans, who distinguish themselves from beasts in part through their analytical powers, this is a troubling con flict.29. distinguish： 区别；in part： 部分地，在某种程度上。Why should thinking be the enemy of generosity? What does it mean that as soon as we enter the “deliberative mindset,” to use Small’s term, we become less altruistic30. altruistic： 利他的，无私心的。towards our fellow man?