The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (49 page)

Without sexual selection, the human proclivity for charity might remain an evolutionary enigma. It is hard to imagine how instincts for giving resources away to strangers would benefit the giver. Usually, evolutionary psychologists explain charity as a side-effect of humans having evolved in small tribal groups, in which any kindness would probably be reciprocated. There would have been no such thing as a stranger in Pleistocene Africa. Yet the psychology of charity is different from the psychology of reciprocity, and several important features of charity cannot be explained as side-effects of reciprocity instincts. I shall take examples from the charitable behavior of people in modern societies. Pleistocene generosity was not the same as modern charity, but it may not have been so different either. We have already seen that traditional hunting was a time-consuming way

to attain higher social, sexual, and moral status by providing a public good. Hunting was charity work.

One puzzle is why many people care so little about the efficiency of charities in transferring resources from givers to receivers. If charity derives from reciprocity, and if reciprocity favors the efficient trading of resources, then we should care deeply about maximizing the benefits of charity to the receiver. This is because, if the beneficiaries of charity ever found themselves able to repay what they had received, they might well feel that it was fair to give back only what had been given to them, and not be asked in addition to meet the high overhead costs incurred by the given Yet many contributors show an odd lack of interest in the efficiency of charities. Some of the largest charities have high administrative overheads, a large proportion of donations going to pay the salaries of their administrators and fundraisers. Some French cancer charities were notorious for distributing less than 10 percent of their revenues to actual research. Many "charity events" are luxurious parties at which donors can meet other donors while drinking champagne. Within two weeks of Princess Diana's death in 1997, British people had donated over £1 billion to the Princess of Wales charity, long before the newly established charity had any idea what the donations would be used for, or what its administrative overheads would be. Only a minority of donors seek out the really efficient charities such as Oxfam, which transfers about 80 percent of donations to the needy, while spending only 3 percent on administration. Charities vary enormously in their efficiency, but most donors do not bother to get good charitable value for their money This attitude contrasts starkly with our concern for government efficiency when we pay taxes that support the ill, the elderly, and the arms dealers.

The phenomenon of "charity work" also reveals how generosity is used as an inefficient fitness display rather than an efficient resource-transfer device. If the wealthy really wanted to help people, they should make as much money as they can doing what they are trained to do, and hand it over to a lower income group

who are trained to help people. The division of labor is economically efficient, in charity as in business. Instead, in most modern cities of the world, we can observe highly trained lawyers, doctors, and their husbands and wives giving up their time to work in soup kitchens for the homeless or to deliver meals to the elderly Their time may be worth a hundred times the standard hourly rates for kitchen workers or delivery drivers. For every hour they spend serving soup, they could have donated an hour's salary to pay for somebody else to serve soup for two weeks. The same argument applies not only to lawyers, but to everyone with an above-average wage who donates time instead of money. So. why do they donate their time? Here again the handicap principle applies. For most working people, their most limited resource is time, not money. By donating time, they help the needy much less efficiently, but show their generosity and kindness much more credibly.

Another feature of human charity is that givers must usually be given tokens of appreciation, which they can display publicly In the United States, donors to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) are rewarded with PBS tote bags, PBS umbrellas, and PBS T-shirts. In Britain, charities offer donors red paper poppies for buttonholes, red plastic clown noses, or red tomato T-shirts. Blood drives usually give donors buttons saying something like "I gave blood today," which essentially proclaim "I am altruistic, not anemic, and HIV-negative." Major benefactors of universities or hospitals usually expect buildings to be named after them. There is the phenomenon of the "anonymous donor," but we should not take the term at face value. A London socialite once remarked to me that she knew many anonymous donors. They were well known within their social circle—the set of people whose opinion matters—even though their names may not have been splashed across the newspapers. I suspect that few male millionaires keep their charitable donations secret from their wives and mistresses.

A final oddity is that people usually avoid giving to charities that nobody else has heard of, however worthy the cause. The result is something approaching a winner-takes-all contest, with the

charities that grow large and well-known attracting ever larger proportions of donations. Charities must spend a large proportion of revenue on "fundraising." This sounds like the pragmatic solicitation of donations. But it often turns out to mean the costly creation of a strong brand identity for the charity, hiring advertising firms to promote the charity in the same way that any other luxury good is marketed. Fundraisers know that when a new charity is launched, it is important to attract a few major donors, so their rivals feel obliged to top those donations with larger ones. The charity's goal is to provoke a donation arms race between local millionaires. From the viewpoint of efficiently transferring resources from the wealthy to the needy, such arms races look pathological. They result in overfunding a few salient diseases in the developed world. They lead to the neglect of more cost-effective programs in the developed world, such as drilling for clean water wells, anti-malaria programs, pro-breast-feeding campaigns, elementary school education, and capital for women's small businesses. If charity really resulted from altruistic instincts for solving other people's problems, we should expect people to take more time to research which charities are most cost-effective and most likely to produce immediate, measurable improvements. This would result in money being spread around much more widely, ameliorating more of the world's avoidable misery. Instead, most donors spend less time researching their charities than they do picking which video to rent. This results in charity fashion cycles, and over-giving to this season's stylish causes.

How can we explain these peculiar features of human charity? They cannot be traced to nepotism or reciprocity. They do not seem to result from socialization for genuine altruism. Instead, they often look like just another form of wasteful, showy display. If the point of charity is to incur the cost of giving rather than to bring real benefits to others, we can understand why people do not care much about the efficiency of charities, and why they donate time when they should be donating money. If charitable donations must be advertised to be effective as signals, we can understand why donors receive little badges to indicate their

generosity, and why charities spend so much fundraising money creating a strong brand identity. If donations are signals subject to the usual demands of recognition and memorability we can understand why people give to famous, oversubscribed causes rather than obscure, worthier ones. Donations as courtship displays would also explain the charity fashion cycles, which are especially apparent among young, single donors. For most of us, our charities are cosmetic.

This is not to say that people giving to charity are "trying to get more sex." They are simply trying to be generous. That is their motivation. My question is why the motivation evolved. Their genuine instincts for generosity just happen to have many of the showy, fashion-conscious features common to other products of sexual selection.

Understanding charity's origin as a sexual display should not undermine its social status. As Robert Frank argued in
Luxury Fever,
we may have evolved instincts for achieving higher social status through conspicuous display, but as rational and moral beings we can still choose conspicuous charity over conspicuous consumption. Every hundred dollars we spend on luxuries could probably have saved a sick child from death somewhere in the developing world if we had donated it to the appropriate charity. The ten-thousand-dollar premium that distinguishes a sport utility vehicle from an ordinary automobile probably cost India a hundred dead children. We may pretend that it did not, but our self-justifications are no comfort to the dead. Perhaps if we imagined a hundred hungry ghosts haunting every luxury vehicle, runaway consumerism would lose some of its sexual appeal. While designer labels advertise only our wealth, the badges of charity advertise both our wealth and our kindness. As it is, the car manufacturers can afford better advertising than the needy children, which is why our instincts for display have been directed more toward consumerism than toward charity

philosophers. Their incomes depend on tips. To economists, leaving tips in restaurants is the classic example of "irrational" human kindness: tips are voluntary donations to non-relatives who are unlikely to reciprocate. According to standard Darwinian models, we should all be very bad tippers. But that is not what we observe. Instead, most waitresses report that groups of men leave much better tips than groups of women, and men on dates with women leave especially good tips if they pay for the meal. That is consistent with sexual selection favoring displays of generosity. One might argue that men leave bigger tips because they have more money to spare. But that is an economically naive argument, because selfish men could have eaten in a slightly more expensive restaurant, or ordered more expensive wine, and left a smaller tip. It is also an evolutionarily fallacious argument in a more interesting sense: it begs the question of why the men bothered to make more money in the first place.

When Ted Turner announced in 1997 that he would donate $1 billion to the United Nations, his wife Jane Fonda did not. We could explain this in two ways. We might say that he could afford it because his personal wealth was over $4 billion, and she could not because hers was only several hundred million. We could take the sex difference in earnings as a given, and use it to explain the sex difference in charity. On the other hand we could ask, from a Darwinian viewpoint, why men should bother acquiring more resources if they just end up giving them away. One clue emerged in a Larry King interview. Turner revealed that when he told his wife of his intended gift, she broke down in tears of joy, crying, "I'm so proud to be married to you. I never felt better in my life." At least in this case, charity inspired sexual adoration.

One of the most extreme examples of male acquisitiveness in the service of charity was John D. Rockefeller, Sr., the 19th-century oil magnate. In business he was a ruthless monopolist, but in private, he was a devout Baptist committed to good works right from adolescence. Even during his first year of work as an assistant accountant at age 15, he gave 6 percent of his paltry annual salary to charity. This rose to 10 percent by age 20 in 1859, when he

raised $2,000 to save his church from bankruptcy by paying off its mortgage, and contributed to a fund for an African-American man in Cincinnati to buy his wife out of slavery His magnanimity did not go unnoticed: one young woman from his congregation reported of the young Rockefeller that, though not especially handsome, "He was thought much of by these spiritual minded young women because of his goodness, his religious fervor, his earnestness and willingness in the church, and his apparent sincerity and honesty of purpose." Even after he was earning $10 million a year in dividends from his Standard Oil monopoly by age 40, he avoided the ostentation of other Gilded Age magnates, preferring to spend his money creating institutions such as the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and the University of Chicago (which incidentally appointed Thorstein Veblen as one of its first faculty members). After age 50, Rockefeller spent much more time researching his charitable efforts than minding his business, and he managed to give much of his billion-dollar fortune away to intelligently chosen causes before dying at age 93. The Rockefeller Foundation was his peacock's tail.

Male Generosity in Courtship

Traditional evolutionary theories of morality have trouble explaining unreciprocated generosity toward non-relatives. They worry about trivial cases like tipping, while ignoring the case where male generosity is most apparent—during sexual courtship. During courtship, males incur very high costs in terms of time, energy, risk, and resources. Some of these costs, like those of bird song, evaporate into thin air, yielding no benefit to the female other than information about male fitness. Other male courtship efforts bring wider social benefits to a whole community, like the legendary knights who slew dragons to win the hand of a princess, or Pleistocene hunters killing mammoths. A few cases even bring benefits to the female, like the prey offered by male scorpionflies.

Some researchers such as Helen Fisher and Camilla Power have viewed human courtship as a social contract where a male

offers resources like meat in exchange for sex. One might caricature human courtship as men using gifts to buy the reproductive potential of women, using the same reciprocity instincts that sustain human trade. In this view, prostitution was the oldest profession, and marriage is a form of prostitution. Economist Gary Becker won his 1992 Nobel Prize for Economics in part for analyzing human marriage in similar contractual terms. In the modern world where every thing becomes corn-modified and every relationship becomes contractual, the reciprocity theory of courtship seems plausible. However, the reciprocity theory collapses on closer inspection.