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For nearly forty years, two of the world’s most distinguished psychologists have locked horns over whether the decision to give can be purely altruistic, or whether it’s always ultimately selfish. Rather than debate philosophy, each has come to battle wielding a deadlier weapon: the psychological experiment.

The
defendant of pure altruism
is C. Daniel Batson, who believes that we engage in truly selfless giving when we feel empathy for another person in need. The greater the need, and the stronger our attachment to the person experiencing it, the more we empathize. When we empathize with a person, we focus our energy and attention on helping him or her—not because it will make us feel good but because we genuinely care. Batson believes that although some people feel empathy more intensely and frequently than others, virtually all humans have the capacity for empathy—even the most disagreeable of takers. As Adam Smith put it centuries ago: “the emotion which we feel for the misery of others . . . is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.”

The
devil’s advocate
is Robert Cialdini, who argues that there’s no such thing as pure altruism. He believes that human beings are frequently generous, giving, and caring. But he doesn’t think these behaviors are entirely altruistic in origin. He believes that when others hurt, we hurt—and this motivates us to help. Cialdini’s first challenge to Batson’s claims was that when empathy leads us to help, it’s not because our ultimate goal is to benefit the other person. He proposed that when others are in need, we feel distressed, sad, or guilty. To reduce our own negative feelings, we help. Cialdini accumulated an impressive body of studies suggesting that when people feel distressed, guilty, or sad toward another person in need, they help.

Batson’s rebuttal: it’s true that people sometimes help to reduce negative feelings, but this isn’t the only reason. And negative feelings don’t always lead to helping. When we feel distressed, sad, or guilty, our ultimate goal is to reduce these negative feelings. In some cases, helping is the strategy that we choose. But in many cases, we can reduce our negative feelings in other ways, such as distracting ourselves or escaping the situation altogether. Batson figured out a clever way to tease apart whether empathy drives us to help because we want to reduce another person’s distress or our own distress. If the goal is to reduce our own distress, we should choose whatever course of action makes us feel better. If the goal is to reduce another person’s distress, we should help even when it’s costly and other courses of action would make us feel good.

In one experiment, Batson and colleagues gave people a choice: watch a woman receive electric shocks or leave the experiment to avoid the distress. Not surprisingly, 75 percent left. But when they felt empathy for the woman, only 14 percent left; the other 86 percent stayed and offered to take the shocks in her place. And of the people who stayed to help, the ones who empathized the most strongly were willing to endure four times as many shocks as those who felt less empathy. Batson and colleagues demonstrated this pattern in more than half a dozen experiments. Even when people can reduce their negative feelings by escaping the situation, if they’re feeling empathy, they stay and help anyway, at a personal cost of time and pain. On the basis of this evidence, Batson concluded that reducing bad feelings is not the only reason people help, and a comprehensive analysis of eighty-five different studies backed him up.

But Cialdini, one of the greatest social thinkers of our time, wasn’t done yet. He acknowledged that empathy can drive helping. Feelings of concern and compassion certainly motivate us to act for the benefit of others at a personal cost. But he wasn’t convinced that this reflects pure altruism. He argued that when we empathize with a victim in need, we become so emotionally attached that we experience a sense of oneness with the victim. We merge the victim into our sense of self. We see more of ourselves in the victim. And this is why we help: we’re really helping ourselves. Quoting Adam Smith again, “By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something.”

Cialdini and colleagues conducted numerous experiments supporting this idea. Empathy leads to a sense of oneness, or self-other overlap, and this leads to greater helping. Batson’s team came back with another rebuttal: that
is
altruism. If we empathize with other people to the point of merging our own identities with theirs, we care about them as much as we care about ourselves. Because we no longer place our interests above theirs, helping them is purely altruistic.

Stalemate.

Both camps agree that empathy leads to helping. Both camps agree that a sense of oneness is a key reason why. But they fundamentally differ about whether oneness is selfish or altruistic. I believe there’s a middle ground here, and it’s one that Deron Beal discovered early on. When he started Freecycle, he wanted to keep used goods out of landfills by giving them away to people who wanted them. But he also had some personal interests at stake. In his recycling program, he had a warehouse full of stuff he couldn’t use or recycle, and his boss wanted the warehouse emptied. In addition, Beal was hoping to get rid of an old mattress that he owned. None of his friends needed it, and it was too big to throw away. To dump it, he would need to borrow a truck and drive the mattress to a landfill, where he would be charged for disposal. Beal realized it would be easier and cheaper if he could just give it away to someone on Freecycle.

This is why many takers and matchers started giving on Freecycle. It’s an efficient way to get rid of things they don’t want and probably can’t sell on Craigslist. But soon, Beal knows from personal experience, people who initially give things away for selfish reasons begin to care about the people they’re helping. When the recipient arranged to pick up his mattress, Beal was thrilled. “I thought I was getting away with giving a mattress away, that I was the one benefiting,” he says. “But when the person showed up at my door and thanked me, I felt good. It was only partially a selfish act: I was helping someone else in a way that made me happy. I felt so darn good about it that I started giving away other items.”

After a decade of research, I’ve come to the conclusion that Beal’s experience is the norm rather than the exception. Oneness is otherish. Most of the time that we give, it’s based on a cocktail of mixed motives to benefit others and ourselves. Takers and matchers may be most likely to give when they feel they can advance others’ interests and their own at the same time. As the primatologist Frans de Waal writes in
The Age of Empathy
, “The selfish/unselfish divide may be a
red herring
. Why try to extract the self from the other, or the other from the self, if the merging of the two is the secret behind our cooperative nature?”

Consider Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written for free by upwards of three million volunteers, with more than a hundred thousand of them contributing regularly. When asked why they write for Wikipedia, hardly any volunteers reported being involved for self-serving reasons, such as to make new contacts, build their reputations, reduce loneliness, or feel valued and needed. But the relatively altruistic value of helping others wasn’t the sole factor they emphasized either. Wikipedia contributors aren’t necessarily givers across the different domains of their lives, but they’re volunteering their time to exhaustively summarize and cross-reference Wikipedia entries. Why? In a survey, two reasons dominated all others: they thought it was fun and they believed information should be free. For many volunteers,
writing Wikipedia entries
is otherish: it provides personal enjoyment and benefits others.

Beal believes the otherish structure of Freecycle is one of the major reasons that it grew so fast. Giving away items that we don’t need, and benefiting others in the process, is the gift economy equivalent of Adam Rifkin’s five-minute favors: low cost to oneself coupled with potentially high benefit to others. It’s noteworthy that Freecycle’s formal mission statement highlights two sets of benefits: members can contribute to others and gain for themselves. The mission is to “build a worldwide gifting movement that reduces waste, saves precious resources & eases the burden on our landfills while enabling our members to benefit from the strength of a larger community.”

Beyond this otherish structure, there’s a central feature of a Freecycle community that motivates people to start giving. A clue to the mechanism lies in the story of a French consultant who struggled for years to earn the trust of a potential client—until he recognized the power of a sense of community.

During the 2008 global financial crisis, one of the many companies to suffer was a French firm that I’ll call Nouveau. Nouveau was headquartered in a small city in the middle of France that boasted a beloved soccer team. The founders had chosen the city as their headquarters in an effort to restore the city’s glory, but the population was shrinking and profits were falling, and there was pressure to relocate to a larger city. Nouveau’s executives decided to save headquarters with a dramatic reorganization. Seeking outside assistance, the CFO issued a request for proposals to consulting firms. Nouveau was open to working with whichever firm presented the best proposal, with one exception: one particular consulting firm could not be trusted. This firm had been working with Nouveau’s chief competitor for years. Nouveau’s top brass worried that inside information could be leaked accidentally—or even stolen by a taker.

The suspect consulting firm’s
lead partner
, who I’ll call Phillippe, was aware of the distrust from the Nouveau executives. Phillippe’s firm had submitted proposals to Nouveau in the past, and they were always rejected. The consultants had repeatedly explained the firm’s strict confidentiality policies, but the Nouveau executives didn’t buy it. Eventually, the consultants concluded that it was a waste of time to continue making proposals. But Phillippe was genuinely interested in contributing to Nouveau’s success, so he led his team in preparing and submitting a proposal for the reorganization. Then they sat down to brainstorm: how can we prove to Nouveau that we’re trustworthy?

Phillippe’s firm was the last to pitch to Nouveau. At the pitch meeting, Phillippe arrived at Nouveau’s headquarters with five consultants in tow. They were escorted into a large room where ten Nouveau executives sat across from them. Phillippe’s team presented the proposal, and the Nouveau executives were unmoved. “We like your proposal,” one executive said, “but we can’t trust you. Why should we enter into a relationship with you? How can we be sure that you will put our interests first?” Phillippe reminded them of his firm’s confidentiality policies and code of honor, reinforcing that its reputation hinged on upholding the highest standards for clients, but his promise fell on deaf ears.

Phillippe had run out of logical arguments, so he resorted to the only other ammunition that he had. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out the blue scarf of the city’s famed soccer club. Donning the scarf as a symbol of hometown pride, he made a plea: “We’ve been trying to convince you for many years that our confidentiality policies can be trusted. Since we’re not managing to say that with words, we’d like to show our commitment in a different way.” The five members of Phillippe’s team followed suit, putting the soccer scarves around their necks.

The Nouveau executives were surprised. They asked which partner would take the lead on the project. Phillippe stepped up: “I am going to take the lead, and we will begin our work over the August break. I can commit to this because your headquarters is next to my home.”

A few hours later, Phillippe’s firm landed the project.

The Nouveau executives had not known that Phillippe was from their city. “This was a reorganization task,” Phillippe explains, “and having someone care about this city, and the people living in it, was a plus for the employees and the company. It was a bit of
common ground
.”

Common ground is a major influence on giving behaviors. In one experiment, psychologists in the United Kingdom recruited fans of the Manchester United soccer team for a study. When walking from one building to another, the soccer fans saw a runner slip on a grass bank, where he fell holding his ankle and screaming in pain. Would they help him?

It depended on the T-shirt that he was wearing. When he wore a plain T-shirt, only 33 percent helped. When he wore a Manchester United T-shirt, 92 percent helped. Yale psychologist Jack Dovidio calls this “activating a
common identity
.” When people share an identity with another person, giving to that person takes on an otherish quality. If we help people who belong to our group, we’re also helping ourselves, as we’re making the group better off.
*

A common identity was a key active ingredient behind the rapid growth of Freecycle, and the unusually high levels of giving. When Berkeley professor Robb Willer’s team compared Craigslist and Freecycle members, they were interested in the degree to which each group experienced identification and cohesion. The more members identified, the more they saw Craigslist or Freecycle as an important part of their self-images, as reflecting their core values. The more cohesion members reported, the more they felt part of a meaningful Craigslist or Freecycle community. Would members experience greater identification and cohesion with Craigslist or Freecycle?

The answer depends on how much a member has received from the site. For members who received or bought few items, there were no differences in identification and cohesion between Craigslist and Freecycle. People were equally attached and connected to both sites. But for members who received or bought many items, there were stark differences: members reported substantially greater identification and cohesion with Freecycle than Craigslist. This was true even after accounting for members’ tendencies toward giving: regardless of whether they were givers or not, members who participated frequently felt more attached to Freecycle than to Craigslist. Why would people feel more identified and connected with a community where they give freely rather than matching evenly?