Letting Myself Care
Recently I was talking with friends about what role emotion should play in giving decisions. Some said we shouldn't let emotions muddle our thinking.
We're emotional creatures (some more than others). Personally, I'm pretty high on the bleeding-heart scale. One thing I loved about Oxfam is that they do a great job documenting their work in articles and photography, so I could feel really connected to the people they work with. (SCI is also very good at this-ed.) I put their pictures on my wall. I wanted to see their faces."But I want to have an emotional connection to the people I help," another said. I found myself agreeing with both sides.
Of course, I don't want to choose a cause based on how emotionally connected I already am to it. I don't want to pass up an excellent opportunity to help because I felt more pulled to a less effective cause. When it comes to choosing a cause, I want to act based on information, not sentiment. At the end of the year I'll reevaluate which charities to support, and I don't want to be muddled when I do that.
But once I've chosen a cause, I give myself permission to fall in love with it. What I care about, after all, is not the cause itself but the human lives at stake. (For you, it might be animal lives as well, or the lives of people not yet born. But you get the idea.) So I look for a way to connect. (For example, seeing how DtW help the individuals they treat here-ed.)
Against Malaria Foundation posts photos of most of its bednet distributions. It's a way to document that they're doing what they say they are - but for me, it's also a chance to see the human face of the work they do. The work I help them do.
Seeing her face is a way of overcoming the blind chance that put me in the US and her in Mali. It's a way of making us neighbours.
It's hard to feel warm and fuzzy about our donations going to dozens of distribution points around the world. We didn't evolve to feel an emotional glow about numbers. It can feel like we're sending money into some kind of oblivion. It's hard to feel motivated about that.
That's why I imagine it going to her. I imagine how glad her family will be to see her reach her eighth birthday, eleventh birthday, twentieth birthday. I imagine all the things she can do now that she's not sick. That kind of glow is what my heart was made for.
See the personal difference that SCI and DtW make here.
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Comments
Great post. I don't read enough feel-good posts. In hindsight it seems like a good idea. I imagine thinking about the good your doing on a emotional level keeps you motivated to keep giving.
Lovely post - I should try and take this attitude more myself, as I probably don't get as much of a warm glow from giving as I could!
Agreed with the other commenters, although as you hinted the more emotionally invested you become the harder it can be to switch charities as new information on effectiveness comes to light. In fact I find abandoning charities to be really hard, in part because they will sometimes ring me to ask why I stopped donating and it puts me in the awkward position of having to explain my decision. That's an opportunity to educate them on the need to demonstrate effectiveness, but some of them are quite adept at demonstrating their effectiveness with examples and data. So I sometimes find myself holding on to charities whose effectiveness hasn't yet been verified convincingly (e.g., Oxfam) simply because I believe in them, trust them, or (worse) don't want to have to defend my decision to stop giving to them.
Back in the early days of my giving, when I simply responded to solicitations, I started giving money to UNICEF. I tried to stop a few times, but UNICEF have some very articulate, dedicated staff who talked me out of it each time. So I continue to give to them but only a nominal amount (about US$30/month).
Back to the point at hand, though, I do think that once we are comfortable with our choice of a charity, we owe it to ourselves to get emotionally involved. The emotional gratification we feel when we see tangible results and realize that our donations are making real differences to real lives is the "payback" that helps keep us motivated to keep giving, and to give more.
Brad -
Good point about it being hard to switch. I find my opinion on charities is heavily swayed by the last person I talked to. When I was trying to decide whether to switch from Oxfam to GiveWell-recommended charities, I talked to smart people from both Oxfam and GiveWell. It's totally possible that my decision would have been different if I'd spoken to them in the other order.
I think of the new GiveWell recommendations as kind of an exciting Christmas present - there's some new better opportunity out there! (Which may not actually be true, as when Village Reach stopped being the top pick because it got so funded, not because there was something better out there than when Village Reach was first recommended. But I think it's a helpful attitude for me to have.)
I like to think I manage my giving through a "portfolio" approach, balancing various priorities (e.g. addressing short-term immediate needs while also tackling long-term issues, such as adapting to climate change, that will save many more lives in future), but the reality is more that I have a hard time letting go and my "old" charities drag along for the ride with the ones.
I can rationalise anything: I justify my continued giving to UNICEF because I view it as a sort of gateway drug for giving: it's an entry point that may cause people to start learning about the needs of people in developing countries, and it certainly has name recognition. It only accounts for a tiny portion of my overall giving, and I know I'd achieve more by diverting that amount to more effective charities, but I have a hard time just cutting them off.
Nice piece, Julia! I wrote a blog post (http://reducing-suffering.blogspot.com/2010/04/salience-and-motivation.html) in 2010 with a similar suggestion: "First do the math, and then come up with the 'marketing' (feel-good images and unconscious persuasions) to back it up. But don't neglect the marketing: Math alone can't sustain motivation on a day-to-day basis. We also need the help of appropriately designed social and environmental surroundings to keep our emotions in line with our fundamental values."
I am not sure if things will get better now and thanks much for all the help.. i could always do on what's best for me then.
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