The psychology of charitable donations

One of the better Planet Money episodes in recent memory: Why Raising Money for Ebola is Hard. Doctors Without Borders in Africa is overwhelmed with the latest outbreak. Donations would help, but they are at a trickle.

As Atul Gawande and many others have noted, containing Ebola in its current form is actually quite straightforward.

This relatively weak transmissibility makes the standard public-health technique of contact-tracing effective in halting the disease. Track down the people who’ve been in contact with a sick patient; measure their temperatures and check on them daily for twenty-one days; if any turn up with a fever or looking sick, put them into isolation. Once you get anywhere upward of seventy per cent of the contacts under such surveillance, the disease stops spreading.

Thiss podcast dissecting why so few people donate to help fight Ebola helps to unpack the donor psychology behind fundraising for disasters:

  • The Planet Money episode notes that 90% of donations for disaster relief occur within 90 days of the disaster. But that's contingent on the disaster being sudden, massive, and prominent in a short period of time. Sudden and dramatic disasters, like 9/11 or the Haiti earthquake, are ideal for spurring a massive influx of donations. But a disease that starts with one person and spreads slowly like Ebola can't concentrate world attention the same way, no matter how many people it spreads to over time. The bitter irony is that when this round of Ebola first broke out, donations would have had the greatest leverage because the disease could've been isolated contained much more easily then.

  • People react to visible evidence of severity. Slow building disasters like Ebola lull people into complacency. People have a finite store of charity, and Ebola hasn't generated any iconic horrific imagery to push donors over their emotional tipping point.

  • People don't understand exponential math that well. This outbreak of Ebola may have an R0 or “R-nought” of 1 or even as high as 2. That means it could spread at an accelerating rate. “Should the outbreak continue with recent trends, the case burden could gain an additional 77,181 to 277,124 cases by the end of 2014.” That's still not as intuitive to most people as the tens of thousands of people who died in Haiti the first day of the earthquake.

  • People don't like to contribute to preventative measures, they want their money to make things better immediately. For example, as noted in the podcast, it's almost impossible to raise money to head off a famine that everyone can see coming. People won't donate until people are actually starving.

  • Africa is far away from America and many other first-world countries. Disasters close to home draw more donations. Out of sight, out of mind. I suspect most Americans don't personally know anyone who has been killed by Ebola.

  • Given the irrational lumpiness of charitable donations for disasters noted above, when massive galvanizing disasters do occur, we should capitalize on the spike in charity and allow the organizations on the receiving end of that aid the freedom to hold back some of the funds to allocate to future disasters. Charities would operate more like insurance, or an endowment. The Red Cross tried this after 9/11, but donors erupted in outrage and the head of the Red Cross had to resign.

Not to be glib, but it almost feels like Ebola could benefit from a staged dramatic event to serve as a catalyst to mobilize world sympathy. Or Ebola needs its version of the Ice Bucket challenge, a meme which spurred a vast outpouring of donations for ALS without any precipitating disaster. 

Wisdom of the crowds doesn't seem to apply when it comes to allocation of charitable donations.

GiveWell doesn't have any article about the most worth charities combatting Ebola, but Vox linked to a list from the U.S. Agency for International Development. Among the list is Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), and they've posted a page on their efforts to combat Ebola. That's my choice. GiveWell says of MSF: “We have a positive view of MSF and have recommended them for disaster-relief donations in the past.”

The Players Tribune

Derek Jeter's new website The Players Tribune launched, and its senior editor Russell Wilson, the Seahawks star QB, penned the site's first piece.

On one level, the idea of athletes going direct to the public in their own words makes a lot of sense. Sports reporters have long made little of their access to players in the locker room and in press conferences, asking the same uninspired questions and recording the same rote answers.

Reporters used to have a tacit understanding with their rich and famous subjects: personal lives and indiscretions were off limits. We make much of the recent domestic violence cases in the NFL, and rightly so. However, it's easy to forget that sports idols of years past were also guilty of such sins, but the press kept mum. Joe Dimaggio beat Marilyn Monroe, but he was pitching Mr. Coffee late in his career.

At some point, that changed, not just in sports, but in politics. Would John F. Kennedy get away with all his affairs in this day and age? Ask Gary Hart. I'm not a press historian, but everything seemed to change with Watergate. Woodward and Bernstein became the new heroes of journalism, and suddenly everything was fair game. The more sordid the better.

Once the relationship between the press and the people they covered transformed into a sort of tacitly adversarial game, access for journalists no longer meant as much. Suddenly everyone was on guard around reporters.

This applies to business world as well. At most tech companies I've worked at, the default PR policy is “no comment” and not just because they don't want to reveal future product plans to the competition. The risk reward ratio of going on the record, especially for established companies, doesn't favor honesty. You might get some widespread awareness from opening the kimono, but as an established company like an Amazon, Apple, Facebook, or Google, there's never any shortage of ink anyhow.

As a startup trying to get your name out there, the equation is different, of course. That's one case where the adage “any PR is good PR” held because awareness is at such a premium, especially now.

But in general, working with the press, which I've had to do a few times, isn't as fun as it could be. As someone who respects and likes many reporters, I've often wanted to be more forthcoming, but as the voice of every company I've worked at it's not possible. Most fun conversations with reporters are about other companies and occur at social events over drinks. On the record I've always been a bore.

On the other side of the table, most journalists now rightly regard most story pitches from tech companies as marketing pitches. Reporters are looking for some unique angle or insight on every story, and the companies generally know that the positive story they want to pitch doesn't make for the type of narrative that makes good copy. You never know what spin the reporter is going to put on your pitch. If you're lucky, they accept and parrot your pitch while making it sound like an honest opinion, but as a consumer of much tech journalism those stories are of little to no interest.

Many companies now take The Players Tribune approach and just put big announcements out on their own company blog first (or a press release, but the blog gives the story a URL which is critical). Since that is the first take on the story and gets the most social media linking, companies maximize their chance to come out of the gates owning the top headline in the Techmeme story cluster for that event. In essence, the company can speak directly to the public and frame the story in their own words while reporters scramble to digest the blog post and come up with their own spin. Any negative spin inevitably lags.

All of which leads back to The Players Tribune. In this new age, celebrities already have the ability to talk to the public unmediated through Twitter, Instagram, and the internet in general. Lebron can demand that ESPN host The Decision or that Sports Illustrated publish his announcement of his return to Cleveland verbatim.

In this world, will The Players Tribune actually carry revealing content? Possibly, but I'm skeptical. For famous athletes, endorsement money makes up a large percentage of their net income, and being revealing and honest about their lives isn't that appealing to advertisers. Coke or Nike or McDonalds isn't looking for colorful stories from their roster of athletes. For that reason, I'm suspicious of how compelling The Players Tribune will be.

Of course, not all athletes pursue the same publicity strategy. Dennis Rodman is one example of someone whose public awareness exploded when he ran to the fringe. But for the most part, society is much more tolerant of hearing wild and crazy stories about musicians than athletes. We almost expect artistic genius to come with a certain amount of sex, drugs, and moral entropy, but our preferred narrative of our star athletes is that they are in the gym busting their butts because of their deep desire to win. My favorite sports tell-alls, the most revealing autobiographies, tend to come from fringe players, not from stars. Jim Bouton comes to mind.

I hope I'm wrong. If The Players Tribune signs Charles Barkley up for a personal blog, I'll come running.

The science behind good writing

This hunger for coherence has important implications. As Pinker shows, the letter sequence M-D-P-H-D-R-S-V-P-C-E-O-I-H-O-P is difficult to remember, though not when chunked as MD-PHD-RSVP-CEO-IHOP. Each chunk contains subsets of meaning; if these unfold coherently, the reader makes sense of them; complexity is rendered into manageable bits. That helps explain how a memory expert dazzles 100 audience members by recalling their names, and it’s what makes even a detailed text with a clear hierarchical structure easy for the reader to assimilate: “At any level of granularity, from clauses to chapters, the passage can be represented in the reader’s mind as a single chunk, and the reader never has to juggle more than a few chunks at a time as he figures out how they are related.”

It’s fascinating to learn the science that underlies the stylistic techniques good writers seem to intuit—for example, a list is most easily grasped if the bulkiest item comes at the end (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness ; or The Wild, The Innocent, and The E Street Shuffle; or Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!). “Light-before-heavy is one of the oldest principles in linguistics,” Pinker writes, “having been discovered in the fourth century BCE by the Sanskrit grammarian Pānini.” Why? Because the mind must hold the early items in suspension before incorporating the final one, and it’s easier to retain simple things than more complex elements.

From a review of Steven Pinker's upcoming book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person'’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.  I have a vast collection of usage books, and I pre-ordered this to add to my collection, to sit alongside favorites like Strunk and White's The Elements of Style (of course) and one of my favorite books of all time, Garner's Modern American Usage.

“Many experiments have shown that readers understand and remember material far better when it is expressed in concrete language that allows them to form visual images,” Pinker tells us. (This explains why white Econoline van is preferable to getaway car; and a mound of flowers, balloons, and teddy bears is more effective than impromptu roadside memorial.) Or this: “It’s good for a writer to work with the ongoing newsreel in readers’ minds and describe events in chronological order.”He showered and put on his new suit before he went to dinner is easier to understand than He went to dinner after he showered and put on his new suit. Similarly, positive statements are more readily grasped than negative ones, and so negation should not be used for no good reason. (That’s a joke.) And my favourite Pinkerism of all, the undisputed first rule of worthwhile prose: “a writer has to have both something to talk about (a topic) and something to say (the point).” Are you listening, bloggers of the world?

Discipline

Yet secular black culture thrives on colorful stories of punishment that are passed along as myths of ancient wisdom — a type of moral glue that holds together varying communities in black life across time and circumstance. Black comedians cut their teeth on dramatically recalling “whoopings” with belts, switches, extension cords, hairbrushes or whatever implement was at hand. Even as genial a comic as Bill Cosby offered a riff in his legendary 1983 routine that left no doubt about the deadly threat of black punishment. “My father established our relationship when I was 7 years old,” Mr. Cosby joked. “He looked at me and says, ‘You know, I brought you in this world, I’ll take you out. And it don’t make no difference to me, cause I’ll make another one look just like you.’ ”

The humor is blunted when we recall that Marvin Gaye’s life ended violently in 1984 at the hands of his father, a minister who brutalized him mercilessly as a child before shooting him to death in a chilling echo of Mr. Cosby’s words.

Perhaps comedians make us laugh to keep us from crying, but no humor can mask the suffering that studies say our children endure when they are beaten: feelings of sadness and worthlessness, difficulties sleeping, suicidal thoughts, bouts of anxiety, outbursts of aggression, diminished concentration, intense dislike of authority, frayed relations with peers, and negative high-risk behavior.

Equally tragic is that those who are beaten become beaters too. And many black folks are reluctant to seek therapy for their troubles because they may be seen as spiritually or mentally weak. The pathology of beatings festers in the psychic wounds of black people that often go untreated in silence.
 

Powerful op-ed by Michael Eric Dyson in the NYTimes, with an interesting dive into the etymology of the word “discipline.”

Many believers — including Mr. Peterson, a vocal Christian — have confused the correction of children’s behavior with corporal punishment. The word “discipline” comes from the Latin “discipuli,” which means student or disciple, suggesting a teacher-pupil relationship. Punishment comes from the Greek word “poine” and its Latin derivative “poena,” which mean revenge, and form the root words of pain, penalty and penitentiary.

The point of discipline is to transmit values to children. The purpose of punishment is to coerce compliance and secure control, and failing that, to inflict pain as a form of revenge, a realm the Bible says belongs to God alone.
 

The word discipline is a fascinating one. On the one hand, it comes loaded with dark undertones when used in the modern sense of that which enforces order. “Training that corrects, molds, or perfects the mental faculties or moral character.” As in "disciplining a child."

If we speak of the child as a "disciple" then the education of that child sounds much less ominous. Discipline and disciple, both nouns, separated by just three letters, yet the difference in meaning is a chasm one needs a suspension bridge to cross.

Discipline can be just as positive a term when used to describe a type of self-control that a person possesses. A person with “discipline” is thought of as someone with persistence, a strong work ethic, mental fortitude, the ability to resist distraction and temptation.

It's in the transfer of discipline from one person to another that we wander into a twisted etymological maze.

Brittney Cooper penned a good and related piece in Salon on the differences between black and white child-rearing.

Stakes are high because parenting black children in a culture of white supremacy forces us to place too high a price on making sure our children are disciplined and well-behaved. I know that I personally place an extremely high value on children being respectful, well-behaved and submissive to authority figures. I’m fairly sure this isn’t a good thing.

If black folks are honest, many of us will admit to both internally and vocally balking at the very “free” ways that we have heard white children address their parents in public. Many a black person has seen a white child yelling at his or her parents, while the parents calmly respond, gently scold, ignore, attempt to soothe, or failing all else, look embarrassed.

I can never recount one time, ever seeing a black child yell at his or her mother in public. Never. It is almost unfathomable.

...

For black children, finding disciplinary methods that instill a healthy sense of fear in a world that is exceptionally violent toward them is a hard balance to find.

The thing is, though: Beating, whupping or spanking your children will not protect them from state violence.  It won’t keep them out of prison. Ruling homes and children with an iron fist will not restore the dignity and respect that the outside world fails to confer on adult black people.

What these actions might do is curtail creativity, inculcate a narrative about “acceptable” forms of violence enacted against black bodies, and breed fear and resentment between parents and children that far outlasts childhood.

Violence in any form is not love. Let us make sure first to learn that lesson. And then if we do nothing else, let us teach it to our children.

By the way, by whatever measure, the NFL is having a rough year. Beyond all the high profile domestic violence cases, I was surprised at how quickly the NFL has turned about face and admitted that its sport is causing severe brain damage to roughly a third of its participants.

The National Football League, which for years disputed evidence that its players had a high rate of severe brain damage, has stated in federal court documents that it expects nearly a third of retired players to develop long-term cognitive problems and that the conditions are likely to emerge at “notably younger ages” than in the general population.

The findings are a result of data prepared by actuaries hired by the league and provided to the United States District Court judge presiding over the settlement between the N.F.L. and 5,000 former players who sued the league, alleging that it had hidden the dangers of concussions from them.

“Thus, our assumptions result in prevalence rates by age group that are materially higher than those expected in the general population,” said the report, prepared by the Segal Group for the N.F.L. “Furthermore, the model forecasts that players will develop these diagnoses at notably younger ages than the generation population.”
 

We won't see the effects immediately, but perhaps we're at an inflection point for the NFL and the sport of football. We may not see immediate declines in the sport's popularity, it is a secular religion in America, a Sunday ritual deeply embedded in the lives of so many fans. But I have to imagine we'll see a decline in youth participation in football given the clear health risks.