Why Be So Nice?

Humans sometimes perform acts of kindness for complete strangers knowing that they'll never be repaid. Why?

Written by Jimmy Alfonso Licon.

The ethicist Peter Singer argues we have a moral obligation to donate a substantial portion of our income to the poor, especially the extremely poor overseas—people who need basic medical care, and sometimes don’t even have enough food to eat. He motivates this position with the following thought experiment:

Imagine you're walking in a park, past a shallow ornamental pond, and you notice that a small child has fallen in and seems to be in danger of drowning. You look around: where are the parents or the babysitter? But there's nobody, except you and the child. What should you do? Of course, you think, I must rush in and save the child. Then you remember you're wearing you favorite, quite expensive pair of shoes, and they'll get ruined if you rush into the pond. Is that a reason for not saving the child? I'm sure you'll say: no it isn't; you just can't compare the life of a child to the cost of a pair of shoes, no matter how expensive.¹

For our purposes, I’m not interested in whether Singer is right. Instead, I am curious about something else: when I ask people about this thought experiment, they overwhelmingly say we ought to save the drowning child—at least where the costs of doing so aren’t too high. But why would anyone save a strange child that they would never see again—what is the motivation?

It isn’t puzzling, from an evolutionary perspective, why people would help their children or loved ones—people who they either have a genetic investment in. Nor is it puzzling why they’d help someone who is likely to reciprocate (implicitly: ‘I’ll help you now, if you help me latter’). What is puzzling, though, is that most people are psychologically inclined to help strangers in need, perhaps not always but in some situations, even when they aren’t genetically invested in that individual and they don’t have any reason to believe that their generosity and kindness will be repaid. Sometimes people help others when they know they will never see them again.

The question is why people do this at all. One initial, but sloppy answer, is that people are often nice; it would be mean and cold-hearted to simply walk away, rather than do something to save the drowning child. Had our species been mean-spirited, we might think nothing of walking away, rather than helping a strange child we would likely never see again. To clarify, the point isn’t that people lack moral reasons to save the drowning child. The question is why we tend to be psychologically wired to care about the child.

One answer—though there are likely many answers, since people are complex—is that we use such cases to signal to others that we are good people, who are worthy of trust and would make a good cooperator. Why the need to signal? For the simple reason that we simply cannot read the minds of others, and thus lack sufficient knowledge of what they believe, want and will do in any given situation. We need to know that people we cooperate with can be trusted. This is because humans are a highly social and cooperative species—in a sense, it is our evolutionary superpower. As Dan Sperber and Nicholas Baumard explain:

[Humans] depend for their survival and welfare on frequent and varied cooperation with others. In the short run, it would often be advantageous to cheat, that is, to take the benefits of cooperation without paying the costs. Cheating however may seriously compromise one's reputation and one's chances of being able to benefit from future cooperation. In the long run, cooperators who can be relied upon to act in a mutually beneficial manner are likely to do better in what may be called the ‘cooperation market’.²

As a matter of fact, a good reputation is beneficial for long-term survival and flourishing. People are aware, to a greater or lesser extent, just how important their reputations are for their long-term well-being. Presumably this conscious, abiding concern for one’s moral reputation prompts people to make conscious choices with their reputation in mind. As a 2017 study found:

[Maintaining] a moral reputation is one of people’s most important values … [people] reported preferring jail time, amputation of limbs, and death to various forms of reputation damage (i.e., becoming known as a criminal, Nazi, or child molester).³

Not only do most people recognize how valuable their moral reputations are with respect to cooperation and survival, but they begin to recognize this fact at a very young age. A fairly recent study found that:

[Informing] children that their classmates held a favorable view of them might motivate them to uphold their positive reputation by resisting the temptation to cheat. We found clear evidence of this in 5-year-olds, who showed substantially lower rates of cheating in the reputation condition than in the control condition. There was also some evidence that the reputation information influenced younger children: even 4-yearolds who cheated were slower to do so in the reputation condition, which suggests that the cues in the reputation condition made the 4-year-olds more reluctant to cheat, even if they ultimately cheated.⁴

Since we need others to cooperate with us in order to survive, thrive and reproduce, we need some hard-to-fake signal that indicates to others that we would make a good cooperative partner. As it happens, engaging in nice behaviors can act as a signal of our trustworthiness and warmth—though we often apparently do this unconsciously. Among those nice behaviors, springing into action without thinking too much about the personal costs is a reliable and public sign that one can be trusted. It indicates that we are focusing only on the benefits to others. And this is something we would want in a partner – whether romantic, social, financial or otherwise. There is recent experimental evidence to back this up:

[We] experimentally test the hypothesis that people avoid calculating the costs of cooperation because of reputational concerns. Across two experiments, we demonstrate that when people's decision-making processes are observable to others, they behave in a less calculating way. This observation suggests that they use uncalculating cooperation to gain reputational benefits, and not merely as an efficient way to avoid the (nonsocial) costs of calculating. Thus, we provide the first experimental evidence, to our knowledge, for the key prediction of the reputation account . . . [Observers] perceive uncalculating cooperation as a reliable signal and trust uncalculating cooperators with more money.⁵

Lest one think doing good to signal trustworthiness is motivated by something bad, it is important to keep in mind two factors. First, people need trustworthy cooperators on whom they can depend; in that sense, quality signals have a morally good function. Second, even angels—morally perfect beings—would rely on signaling to the extent they lacked knowledge of what others believed and wanted. We thus benefit from signaling to others we can be trusted, even if that involves helping a stranger we know can never reciprocate. So, even where moral reasons are concerned, we should feel free to signal. People need to know who to trust, and it is nice to be nice.

Jimmy Alfonso Licon is a Philosophy Professor at Arizona State University. He works on ethical issues related to cooperation and ignorance. You can find his Substack here.

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1. Peter Singer (2009). The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to Stop World Poverty. Random House.

2. Dan Sperber and Nichols Baumard (2012). Moral Reputation: An Evolutionary and Cognitive Perspective. Mind & Language 27 (5): 495–518.

3. Andrew J. Vonash et. al., (2018). Death Before Dishonor: Incurring Costs to Protect Moral Reputation. Social Psychological and Personality Science 9 (5): 604-613, p. 604.

4. Genyue Fu, Gail D. Heyman, et. al., (2016). Young children with a positive reputation to maintain are less likely to cheat. Development Science 19 (2): 275-283, p. 278.

5. Jillian Jordan, Moshe Hoffman, Martin A. Nowak, David G. Rand (2016). Uncalculating Cooperation is Used to Signal Trustworthiness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113 (31): 8658–8663, p. 8659.