Science Behind Charity

Neuroscience on what makes people help others

At some point we all have been faced with the decision whether to donate our hard- earned money or not. An interesting question is what provokes such behavior anyway?

Many researches have been conducted on this topic, and many different reasons have been considered. Some are trying to prove that charitable giving at its core is a selfish behavior and is provoked by the pleasure one gets from helping others. Others concentrate on who is more likely to give and why, according to their social and financial status and heritage.

The statistics show that developed countries, with high GDP per capita, have the culture of helping others and donate more through various crowdfunding platforms. But in contrary to this, it is a widespread assumption that poor people tend to be more generous than the rich. This suggests that even though compassion is high in low-class people, they are limited by recourses and have little understanding of technology, hence they do not usually use crowdfunding or other traceable source for donating, making it harder to determine what they actually give away. And although most studies suggest that compassion is the main driver for charitable giving, recent study on how empathy can promote cooperation published in June of 2018 comes to a different conclusion: poor people tend to share more not only because they can relate to those needing help, but because they hope that others will do the same, and eventually they themselves will benefit from it.

All of these researches and experiments are very interesting in general, but they still have different points of view and the results are sometimes controversial, making it harder to come to a universal conclusion. A lot of variables should be taken into account to distinguish what motivates one to give their own to someone for practically nothing other than the satisfaction of action. But it turns out, that by investigating human’s neurological reactions to such activities, we can find out more on what provokes them and impact of such activities on their neurological system.

A study done on neural responses to taxation and voluntary giving found interesting correlation between neural activities in the ventral striatum and insulae (main reward-related component in the midbrain) when a person is getting paid, watches mandatory transfers to a charity, and gives money to a charity voluntarily. The study was published in 2007 by William T. Harbaugh, Ulrich Mayr, and Daniel R. Burghart from the departments of economic research and psychology, and was used by many news outlets as a reference.

To better understand the study, we have to distinguish the ‘pure altruism’ motive and the ‘warm glow’ effect. People with pure altruism motif do not care how the money goes to charity, be it tax-like mandatory transfers or voluntary, all they want is charities to raise funds while warm-glow givers get satisfaction by making the choice to give themselves.

In the experiment participants were monitored using functional magnetic resonance imaging while they played a dictator game, where they received 100$ and made decisions on donating the money voluntarily to a charity or saw their funds transferred in a tax-like mandatory manner.

It is important to note, that activities in ventral striatum and the insulae are mostly linked to processing concrete rewards, like money, food, and so on. This research is the first that discovered activities to processing rewards like getting paid and giving money to others being also linked to the same areas.

Unsurprisingly, the study showed that people who reacted more on getting paid were less likely to give, and people who reacted more on watching the charity get money were almost twice as much more likely to give, to be accurate. Also, when the cost to the giver decreased and transfers to charity increased, the satisfaction rate increased and was higher during voluntary giving than during mandatory transfers. The researchers found that satisfaction rate for voluntary giving was 10% higher than for tax-like transfers. But although the ability to choose provoked higher activations, money raised from mandatory-transfers was still more than from voluntary charity, since those not willing to give their money could reject the transfer.

In general, it all comes down to this: people whose brain activity and satisfaction rate is high when observing charities get money, regardless their social and financial status, are more likely to donate their money willingly than those who appreciate receiving money more. But what this study suggests on top of that is that receiving money and donating money, both activate the same substrates in our brains. This means, that when one gives out money to a charity, at some level the brain relates this activity to receiving money, hence biologically it comes down to be the same thing. Adding the warm-glow effect to the equation, which arises when a person makes the decision to give themselves without anyone obligating them, results in higher satisfaction rates.

William, Ulrich and Daniel took a different approach into analyzing the motives for charitable giving, and used neurological evidence as proof. In conclusion, how much the brain activates and receives satisfaction from either donating or receiving money is totally subjective and circumstantial, however the way human’s brain reacts to both actions identically.

These findings and conclusions might be extremely important for the POWERSHARE project, as they help us better understand how a person reacts to charitable giving and what benefits they get from helping others. Since such behavior activates the same substrates as receiving money for oneself, financial rewards assigned by the platform will serve as additional motivator for the backers.

POWERSHARE is a mutually beneficial crowdfunding platform that turns unused computer power into fuel for important ideas and causes.

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