The Generosity Impulse: Nature or Nurture?

At a time when the US federal government is demonstrating anything but generosity behavior, I was reminded of a course I took in graduate school that examined the nature-versus-nurture aspects of the act of giving. And that reminded me of an informal experiment I conducted over a decade ago inspired by a TED Talk given by Sasha Dichter, a social entrepreneur whose organization measures social impact at home and abroad. For one full month, I had pledged to respond positively to every appeal for a charitable donation that I received, without qualification or condition. I kept a journal to record my actions and reflections, and then I blogged about my experience after the month had passed.

Rereading that long ago post, I chuckled recalling the anxiety this had caused for my husband about the money I was indiscriminately giving away. I also remembered needing to adjust some reflexive behavior: I had to refrain from discarding the direct mail solicitations that arrived with regularity at our doorstep and I had to answer the phone when nonprofit telemarketers called. Plus, since I was traveling each week to New York City back then, I had to give money to every panhandler and street performer I encountered, something I generally avoided. By month’s end, I was poorer and wiser, having apprehended a few things about myself and my relationship to giving. I learned how it is often easier to say “no” than “yes” when asked for help, but also how giving is motivated by many different factors—commitment, certainly, but also belief, passion, morality, duty, guilt, relationships, reputation, and more.

So, are we humans hard-wired to give to others or is extending a helping hand more of a learned social construct? Well, it appears to be a bit of both.

Psychologist Athena Aktipis, who co-leads the Human Generosity Project, a research-based initiative to understand beneficence across cultures, contends that the impulse for generosity has roots in biology, psychology, and sociology. It exists at the cellular level of life in the form of cooperation when single cell organisms arrange themselves into groups. These newly shaped multicellular bodies benefit from teamwork and, ultimately, evolve into multigenerational eusocial societies. (Think bees and ants.) Biologists from the University of Oxford affirm that complex life forms and the long-term survival of any species is based on cooperation—among one’s relatives, neighbors, and even strangers.

An example of a society built on cooperation is the Maasai of East Africa, who practice osotua, a social system of sharing, interdependence, and reciprocity that has evolved to ensure the tribe’s sustainability. Part culture and part religion, osotua involves willingly giving to others when they are in need and not expecting anything in return except for the security of knowing that help is available when requested. For the pastoral Maasai, whose society is dependent upon the health of their grazing livestock, osotua is a way of collectively managing risk in the event of drought, famine, disease, or some other communal or personal misfortune. Aptikis and her colleagues have proven through computer modeling that cooperation is also the best economic choice over the long-term. (Hello, Washington!)

Though decidedly human, cooperation is a characteristic found in other animals, too. Dutch primatologist and ethologist Frans de Waal and his Australian colleague Dr. Victoria Horner have studied the behavior of chimpanzees, both in the field and in the lab. Their research has revealed that chimps are naturally altruistic and empathic. In his entertaining TED Talk, de Waal shares evidence that chimpanzees practice reciprocal altruism, generosity with built-in ROI—I’ll scratch your back and expect that you’ll scratch mine, now or in the future. In subsequent lab experiments, Dr. Horner demonstrated that chimpanzees are also naturally prosocial, regardless of whether they are genetically related to one another.

But is generosity truly innate? Perhaps not, says psychologist Carol Dweck of Stanford University. An experiment she co-designed in 2014 with then graduate student Rodolfo Cortes Barragan engaged one- and two-year old children to examine why individuals help one another. Contrary to previous research studies that found altruism in young humans is natural and spontaneous, and thus must be genetic, they determined the opposite, that altruism is an adaptive behavior dependent on relationships more than instinct.

So how does this relate to my own earlier experiment in generosity? Similar to Dweck’s and Cortes’ findings, I had always understood that altruistic behavior is relational and learned, a result of training, religious upbringing, or instilled values—in other words, a product of socialization. When I conducted my experiment, I had not much considered that traits associated with giving—empathy, compassion, and consolation, as de Waal discovered among chimpanzees—could be genetically determined and a matter of biology.

Regardless of which scientific conclusions are correct, it bears repeating that fostering the conditions that support benevolence is clearly a good thing for humans and other species. So what does this mean for nonprofits? Tapping into people’s altruistic inclinations is as important as embedding generosity into organizational culture. How to do so is a topic for another day.

Image credits:
Busking, 2021. Courtesy of Pacific Legal Foundation
Chimpanzees, 2019. Courtesy of Project Chimps