The Feel-Good School of Philanthropy

THIS year, “Giving Tuesday,” Black Friday’s philanthropic cousin, kicked off our nation’s most generous calendar month. Americans punch up their charitable donations in December, to over an estimated $1 billion a day.

Why do we give? Many motives drive kind actions. We might donate to impress our friends or curry favor. To at least some extent, we also give to help make the world a better place.

A movement known as effective altruism (E.A.) seeks to make us better do-gooders. Often called “generosity for nerds,” effective altruism uses data science to calculate how people can ensure that each dollar they give has the greatest impact on the lives of those in need.

In doing so, effective altruism often directs our good will in counterintuitive ways. For example, someone might donate to the Susan G. Komen Foundation in memory of a relative lost to breast cancer, but E.A. givers reject such personal concerns. Instead, they consult think tanks like GiveWell to find the most efficient ways to reduce suffering — for instance, by combating the spread of parasitic infection in sub-Saharan Africa.

More advanced proponents of E.A. go further. If you want to devote your life to helping others, volunteering to build homes or ladle out soup might not be your best bet. Instead, effective altruists suggest “earning to give”: taking a high-paying job even if it does not reflect your values, because the disposable income you can donate will help more people than you could by volunteering in the field.

Effective altruism replaces old-fashioned philanthropy with sleek, Silicon Valley-style kindness. Accordingly, it has attracted support from high-profile fans like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and produced at least three books this year, including “The Most Good You Can Do,” by Peter Singer, an E.A. advocate and professor of bioethics at Princeton.

Last week’s announcement of a major charitable initiative funded by the fortune of the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, is in keeping with the E.A. trend and has been lauded as a marquee example of earning to give. Even before the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, effective altruism’s bottom line was impressive. It has secured hundreds of millions of dollars in pledges to its top-rated charities, helping millions of people.

The argument that we should maximize the good we do is logically bulletproof. But this is not effective altruism’s only message. The movement also urges givers to divorce their generosity from emotion. For instance, Professor Singer criticizes organizations like Make-a-Wish, which spends an average of $9,425 on feel-good missions to fulfill children’s dreams, when the same amount could make a bigger difference elsewhere. Sentimentality, the argument goes, produces giving that is more self-indulgent than helpful.

Optimized philanthropy requires letting go of empathy for any one victim, and abstracting people’s suffering into calculable units that can be affected en masse and at a distance. To many, this sounds admirable but unnatural — a tension the writer Larissa MacFarquhar captured when she described E.A. as the charitable equivalent of a drone strike program.

Effective altruism’s dismissal of sentiment echoes the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who centuries ago argued that passion was incompatible with moral action. This view also characterizes economic models that say emotional acts don’t “count” as real altruism.

These arguments are misguided. Crucially, they fail to account for psychological evidence that emotion — and especially empathy — adds a powerful, positive spark to philanthropy.

First, emotions reinforce kindness. Over a century of behavioral research demonstrates that people repeat actions that have rewarded them in the past. E.A. proponents deprecate the warm fuzzies people get from making donations, but those positive feelings can encourage more persistent giving.

Consider a study by the social psychologist Lara Aknin and colleagues: Participants recalled a previous purchase made for themselves or someone else, and reported on how good that had made them feel. The researchers then gave participants a cash windfall, and the subjects were invited to choose whether to donate it or spend the money on themselves. The participants who felt a “warm glow” from past altruism were more likely to donate their new winnings, suggesting that the emotional punch of personally meaningful giving — suboptimal from an E.A. perspective — can turn a one-time giver into a habitual philanthropist.

Emotion may also make altruism healthier. Generosity not only makes givers feel good, but reduces their stress level and even extends their lives.

This effect was apparent when my colleagues Sylvia Morelli, Ihno Lee, Molly Arnn and I surveyed Stanford students about their generous behaviors and the emotions they felt. We found that students who acted kindly experienced lower levels of stress and anxiety than their less generous peers. But this was true only to the extent that people felt empathy while helping others.

In other words, if you give without emotion — out of, say, a sense of duty — you may miss out on the benefits. Along similar lines, the social psychologist Sara H. Konrath and her colleagues recently found that volunteering reduced older adults’ mortality risks four years later — though only if their kindness was driven by genuine concern for others.

Effective altruists are right to make us think harder about how our charitable giving can actually reduce the sum of suffering in the world. But when it comes to helping, emotion and efficiency are perfectly compatible. In spite of the stereotypical view of emotion as wild and automatic, people exert enormous control over their feelings.

The same goes for empathy. Psychologists, myself included, have argued that people choose when and with whom to empathize; for instance, we take the time to consider one person’s suffering while turning away from another’s. It’s true that we often choose “easy” empathy, guiding our emotional energy toward people who look like us or whose suffering is well-publicized. But we have other options.

Once we decide to help those most in need, we can turn our empathy in their direction. For example, the University of Kansas professor C. Daniel Batson and his colleagues showed that people who deliberately take the perspective of distant others develop more compassionate attitudes toward them. Choosing empathy in this way aligns passion and principle.

Philanthropy, of course, helps its intended targets, but we should not reduce our generosity to evidence-based, goal-oriented actions. Giving also expresses our values and binds our communities. If we leave room for more everyday, instinctive forms of kindness, we’re actually doing ourselves a favor, too.