...but only because she asked.
Ever played the dictator game? It’s a test that psychologists use to measure people’s altruism. That is, how much you’re willing to share.
One person is given ten dollars and the power to give their partner as much (or as little) as they want. But researchers James Andreoni and Justin M. Rao found that making one change to the rules makes a huge difference in how selfish people are. What is that one thing? Talking.
Turns out that when the person receiving the money remains silent, the giver is likely to keep all the cash. But when the receiver is allowed to talk, the allocator is more willing to be generous. Not only that, but according to the study “when empathy was heightened by putting allocators ‘in the receivers shoes,’ altruism appeared as if recipients had been able to ask, even when they were silent.”
The moral of this story? Communication is as good as gold.
About Lu Fong
This only makes a difference if the individual allocating the money is generally unhealthy (which the majority of people are, unfortunately).
Because, as we know from game theory (the Prisoner’s Dilemma), when people are at their best, they are naturally inclined to cooperate with others, and be generous, right from the start, because that’s the winning strategy in a social environment. It’s only when someone feels threatened already (by previous interactions in life) that they become more conservative, and wait to see if others are generous first, before being generous in return.
(In other words, life is really one long prisoner’s dilemma, and so any new people we encounter are actually lumped into the past set of “interactions with the world”, until/unless we have a reason to change our opinion of how generous the world is being – which will indeed be affected by someone offering useful and interesting information in the form of their own personal thoughts and ideas and feelings and stories.)