The world is confronting a level of suffering unlike any we have experienced for many decades. The World Bank estimates that the COVID-19 pandemic will push as many as 150 million people into extreme poverty worldwide. Closer to home, nearly 6% of Americans are currently out of work, and one out of every seven households with children didn’t get enough to eat in the past seven days. Tragically, our non-profit organizations are suffering as well. Due to a lack of cash, ten percent of them may go out of business by the end of the year—and with them, the services they provide to their communities will disappear as well.

Most of us would like to do something meaningful to help others during these dismal times–especially during the holidays. In the face of so much suffering, however, it’s easy to experience choice paralysis: How do we choose how to help, and whom to help, and how much to help? In this world of finite resources, we can’t help everybody. And with so much need all around us, it is tempting to conclude that there’s no point in trying to help anybody. How can we overcome this despondency about the practical value of our own altruistic impulses?

Over the past several years, I have been studying the history of human generosity in order to figure out how our ancestors made these choices for themselves. In doing so, I have identified five principles that have, time and time again, helped people—individuals and societies alike—to overcome their own philanthropic choice paralysis. These five lessons are no less relevant today than they were when they were discovered decades, centuries, or even millennia ago.

• Give cost-effectively. We are inclined to focus too much on how much time, money, and energy we put into our helping, and not nearly enough on how much of a difference that help will make in others’ lives. Many well-intentioned efforts simply relieve less suffering than others do. We should seek out information on how to get the most bang for our charitable buck.
  
• Give globally and locally. The situation in the US is dire, and we are right to want to help people who are suffering here at home, but if coronavirus takes hold in the world’s poorest nations, the consequences will be catastrophic. As you think about how to invest your time and treasure into charitable activity, keep an eye not only on the US, but also on how Coronavirus is affecting the poorest countries in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
  
• Give collectively. For as long as we have been human, people have pooled their resources to help each other through tough times. Two and a half millennia ago, we began to extend this same logic to the welfare of strangers: When we pool our resources by making contributions to highly respected, cost-effective charities, we can achieve economies of scale that allow us to solve problems decisively instead of merely putting Band-Aids on them.
  
• Give cash. We can help people by serving food, offering emotional support, or basic acts of kindness, of course, but one of the most effective things we can give to people with acute needs is cash. You can’t know exactly what a stranger need most urgently, but he or she does. You can’t pay the rent in diapers, and you can’t pay for child care with food or medicine. With money, though, you can pay for any and all of them.
  
• Set it and forget it. Once you have set your priorities for how to give and how much to give, set your commitments in stone by putting them on autopay. By allowing the charities you select to draw monthly from your bank account, or to charge to your credit card, you won’t have to face choice paralysis again.

By observing these principles, we can not only avoid choice paralysis as we try to act on our most beneficent impulses: We can also imbue our volunteering and our giving with the meaning and purpose that comes from knowing that we are, as the ethicist Peter Singer put it, “doing the most good we can do.”

Originally published in The Social Scientist, the official magazine of the Division of Social Sciences at The University of California, San Diego.

This quarter, I’m teaching a course called Writing About Thinking. The course got a soft launch a couple of years back, when I taught it as an undergraduate seminar at The University of Miami. Now that I’m at UCSD, I am teaching a more advanced version of the course to a very nice group of our PhD students. The course is based on a simple premise: Writing about thinking, which every psychologist must do, is hard, but it’s possible to get better at it by first thinking about thinking. The course, therefore, involves excursions into psychological research on communication, cooperation, memory, syntax, argumentation, and, of course, style.

One of the books we’re reading is Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner’s little book Clear and Simple as the Truth, in which they explicate a style of writing they call Classic Style. It’s an intentionally coy, playful little book that teaches as much about Classic Style by showing what Classic Style is as by telling what Class Style is.

The Classic Style, as Thomas and Turner lay it out, involves several guiding principles. Here are eight principles that I think are among the most important. 

(1) It is based on the conceit that it is possible to say things about the world that are true, and that it is the writer’s job to point to these things. 

(2) It assumes a writer that “takes the pose of full knowledge,” and is competent to explain everything the reader needs to know to understand the subject.

(3) It rests on the gambit that the reader is no less intelligent than the writer. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer happens to know something that the reader doesn’t. The reader is perfectly competent to acquire this truth.

(4) It relies on a writer who is confident in her own abilities. She resists the temptation to argue for the importance of her subject matter, she abstains from complaining about how hard writing is or how hard-won her insights are, and she avoids self-reflection and rumination. The classic-style writer hides her effort, but because she exerted herself so mightily in advance, the end product of her effort appears effortless, as if it could have been written in no other way.

Here, Thomas and Turner convey this idea in what I regard as a triumph of Classic Style:

The classic writer is not like a television cook showing you how to mix mustard and balsamic vinegar. He is like a chef whose work is presented to you at table but whose labor you are never allowed to see, a labor the chef certainly does not expect you to share. There are no salt and pepper shakers on your table.

(5) Because the writer and the reader are intellectual equals, and because the writer is pointing at true things in the world, the two of them can have a conversation. Classic-style writing, when read aloud, sounds like one person talking to another, like a really good tour guide when you’re visiting a museum or a foreign city.

(6) Sentences and paragraphs go somewhere. Each unit of meaning, Thomas and Turner write, “has a clear direction and goal.” The payoff comes at the end of the sentence or passage, but to get to that payoff, the reader must follow a path, made of several steps, along which the writer is leading him.

(7) With all of its reality and pointing and seeing and touring , the Classic Style relies on the same image schema we use to interact with the physical world. Ideas have weight; they develop. Arguments go somewhere. We follow lines of reasoning. By relying on physical imagery, Classic Style is able to depend on some of the cognitive processes that use so successfully to navigate the real world.

(8) No topic is so complex that it cannot be explained.

The first part of Clear and Simple as the Truth is the exposition. The second part is “The Museum,” consisting of a variety of classic-style passages, along with Thomas and Turner’s analyses of them. The Museum is well worth a visit, but its examples are not as helpful for social scientists as examples from actual social science might be. I was therefore very pleased to discover yeseterday that one of my favorite articles in Psychology–Denny Borsboom, Gideon Mellenbergh, and Jaap van Heerden’s The Concept of Validity (which I am currently re-reading for a paper I’m working on, and which I blogged about earlier here)–is an exemplar of classic style.

At the opening of the paper, you find this marvel:

Please take a slip of paper and write down your definition of the term construct
validity. Now, take the classic article of Cronbach and Meehl (1955), who invented the concept, and a more recent authoritative article on validity, for instance that of Messick (1989), and check whether you recognize your definition in these works. You are likely to fail. The odds are that you have written down something like “construct validity is about the question of whether a test measures what it should measure.” If you have read the articles in question carefully, you have realized that they do not conceptualize validity like you do. They are not about a property of tests but about a property of test score interpretations. They are not about the simple, factual question of whether a test measures an attribute but about the complex question of whether test score interpretations are consistent with a nomological network involving theoretical and observational terms (Cronbach & Meehl, 1955) or with an even more complicated system of theoretical rationales, empirical data, and social consequences of testing (Messick, 1989).

Who in psychology opens a paper like that? Too few of us.

A little further along, there’s this:

The argument to be presented is exceedingly simple; so simple, in fact, that it articulates an account of validity that may seem almost trivial. It is as follows. If something does not exist, then one cannot measure it. If it exists but does not causally produce variations in the outcomes of the measurement procedure, then one is either measuring nothing at all or something different altogether. Thus, a test is valid for measuring an attribute if and only if (a) the attribute exists and (b) variations in the attribute causally produce variations in the outcomes of the measurement procedure. The general idea is based on the causal theory of measurement (e.g., Trout, 1999).

And then this: 

That the position taken here is so at variance with the existing conception in the literature is largely because in defining validity, we have reversed the order of reasoning. Instead of focusing on accepted epistemological processes and trying to fit in existing test practices, we start with the ontological claim and derive the adequacy of epistemological practices only in virtue of its truth. This means that the central point in validity is one of reference: The attribute to which the psychologist refers must exist in reality; otherwise, the test cannot possibly be valid for measuring that attribute. This does not imply that the attribute cannot change over time or that that psychological attributes are unchanging essences (cf. Kagan, 1988). It does imply that to construe theoretical terms as referential requires a realist position about the phenomena to which such terms refer. Thus, measurement is considered to involve realism about the measured attribute. This is because we cannot see how the sentences Test X measures the attitude toward nuclear energy and Attitudes do not exist can both be true. If you agree with us in this, then you are in disagreement with some very powerful philosophical movements that have shaped validity theory to a large extent.

In spite of their scholarly apparatus (such as citations in parentheses, maybe slightly too much meta-discourse), these passages bear all of the marks of Classic Style. No hedging, no apologizing, no showing off, plenty of grounding in spatial imagery (with its taking of positions, reversings of causal orderings, and so on), and a confidence that even a very complicated idea can be expressed in plain English to any reader who is willing to take some time out to “talk” with an expert about it.

As a bonus, the paper itself pushes what I regard as a classic-style view of science, measurement, and validity. On Borsboom and colleagues’ view of measurement, things either exist or they don’t, and it’s only the things that exist that can be measured. And a measure has validity as a measure of that invisible entity (intelligence, self-esteem, reading comprehension, or whatever) only if that invisible entity is real and if that entity is involved in the chain of causal processes that lead to the representations that we take to be “measurements.” Reality is out there, validity is much simpler than you think, and when we do measurement, we take a sounding of real things. I love the fit here between the the writers’ medium and their message: Borsboom and colleagues help their case along through clear, confident, conversational writing that asks the reader to no more than look where the writer is pointing. 

I just received word from OneWorld Publications, which is publishing The Kindness of Strangers in the UK, that they are delaying publication until September.

By then, one hopes, the world will be in good enough shape that people will have the bandwidth to turn their attention to non-Covid matters.

Until then, please enjoy the UK cover for the book, which I think is just dandy.

The New York Times has been doing some excellent reporting about the spread of COVID-19. I particularly admire their graphics, which put the message into a visual form that anyone with the eyes to see can comprehend and appreciate.

One hopes that most Americans now know that COVID-19 spreads through person-to-person contact, and that the best way to avoid contracting or spreading the virus is to avoid interacting with others in close proximity–or better still, to simply stay home. Has this message sunk in? The visualizations published in today’s NYT (which are not only informative, but also beautiful), which are based on analyses of 15 million anonymous Americans’ cell phone use over the past few weeks, show just how much (or little) people in each U.S. county have been curtailing their travel over the past few weeks.

The three lessons these data teach are striking and troubling.

First, there is tremendous county-by-county variation in how much people have reined in their travel. In some counties (in the light pastels and greys below), travel has ground to a near standstill, with the average daily travel declining from five miles a day to around a mile or so:

Clearly, people in those light-pastel and grey counties have stopped driving their cars and have turned instead to walking their dogs:

Second, the declines in travel are not uniformly distributed across the nation. It is particularly noteworthy that counties with stay-at-home orders in place have had much steeper reductions in travel than those without travel orders in place. People in counties with stay-at-home orders have curtailed their travel by 80% or so; those in counties without stay-at-home orders have curtailed their travel by maybe 65%. That difference of 15% might not sound like much, but it’s actually a huge effect, so readily comprehensible to the naked eye that you don’t even have to do any statistics on the data to appreciate the difference:

Third, the counties with stay-at-home orders are mostly concentrated in the Northeast, the West Coast, and the Midwest. Unsurprisingly, given how few stay-at-home orders are in place, the counties in which people have reduced their travel the least are concentrated in the South. In Duval County, where I grew up, people were still driving about 3.4 miles per day this past Friday, making it the third least staying-at-home large county in the Nation. (My family members in Duval County, to my great relief, have been locked down in their homes for two weeks).

These figures say all we really need to know about staying at home during this crisis: Whether you like the idea of the state or county officials ordering Americans to stay at home during outbreaks of communicable diesases (for what it’s worth, the federal government arrogated that power long ago, and has exercised it with impunity, as the need has arisen, for centuries), stay-at-home orders seem to be working (bearing in mind the standard caveats about correlation vs. causation). The apparent effectiveness of stay-at-home orders at getting people to stay at home is so striking that it’s almost as if people possess a tendency to heed the directives of people in positions of legitmate authority–particularly when those people have the ability to impose sanctions.

The second lesson, equally clear, is that the Southern states, along with Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Wyoming, and a few others, are still in for a great deal of pain.

In conversations with my publisher, and after much deliberation, we have decided to push the release of The Kindness of Strangers to July 21. In the meantime, you can read a bit about it (or pre-order it) here.   

Thank you for your patience. Everything is up in the air these days.  

Stay well and stay indoors.

Are humans hardwired to care about strangers? Glancing over my bookshelves, titles such as Born to Be Good, The Compassionate Instinct, and The Altruistic Brain remind me that many of my scientific colleagues answer this questions with a resounding yes. Each of these books, in its own way, teaches that the animal designated Homo sapiens has evolved for compassion. Caring about strangers is just part of who we are. If it doesn’t come effortlessly, all it takes is some patience and some practice. Attend a workshop. Volunteer at a homeless shelter. Read some fiction. Meditate. Compassion is inside of you. You just need to coax it out.

One of the ways we have been taught to coax empathy out is by deliberately trying to take the perspective of a suffering person. “Try to see things from his point of view.” “Imagine how it would feel to walk a mile in her shoes.” “How would you feel if the shoe were on the other foot?” (A surprising number of shoes make an appearance in these aphorisms.) We encourage our kids to take the perspective of the people who might be negatively affected by their nasty or self-centered behavior, hoping that our admonitions are doing something to turn them into better people. But does encouraging people to take the perspective of others actually work?

For half-century (give or take a few months) experimental psychologists have been working under the assumption that perspective-taking does, in fact, encourage empathy. The social psychologist Ezra Stotland was the first person to try to encourage empathy with what have come to be called “perspective-taking instructions.” According to Stotland’s research, it worked.

By the way, here’s a fun photo of Professor Stotland with Ted Bundy. That’s Ted on the left; Ezra’s on the right. (This really deserves a blog entry of its own.)

Following Stotland’s 1969 lead, researchers have been using perspective-taking instructions in attempts to manipulate empathy experimentally for five decades. In the typical experiment, subjects encounter a stranger in the lab who is going through something difficult in his or her personal life; then, the experimenter asks subjects to do one of several things. To encourage perspective-taking, researchers might instruct subjects to

try to imagine how the person feels about what has happened and how it was affected his or her life. Try not to concern yourself with attending to all of the information presented. Just concentrate on trying to imagine how the person feels.

In a variant of these standard perspective-taking instructions, researchers instruct participants to imagine how they (rather than the suffering person) might feel in a similar predicament:

try to imagine how you yourself would feel if you were experiencing what has happened to the person and how this experience would affect your life. Try not to concern yourself with attending to all of the information presented. Just concentrate on trying to imagine how the person feels.

To encourage still other subjects to remain objective (under the premise that doing so will squelch empathy), researchers instruct subjects to

1. Imagining how the needy person feels does not generate any more empathy than imagining how you yourself might feel in the same situation.

In other words, “Imagining how he/she might feel” = “imagining how you might feel.”

2. Imagine-other and imagine-self instructions do not generate any more empathy than receiving no instructions at all.

In other words, Perspective-Taking = No Instructions.

3. People instructed to remain objective experience less empathy than people who are not given any instructions at all.

In other words, No Instructions > Remain Objective.

4. People who get perspective-taking instructions experience more empathy than people instructed to remain objective.

In other words, Perspective Taking > Remain Objective.  (SEE: TRANSITIVE PROPERTY OF MATHEMATICS.) This contrast is the only reason why Perspective Taking Instructions Appear to boost empathy. They don’t. Instead, Remaining Objective reduces empathy.

For people who like to stare at the results of meta-analyses, here is a figure that summarizes those results reasonably well.

• While it may be true that trying to take the perspective of needy others encourages empathy for their plights, it’s not true to say that there’s a great deal of experimental evidence for it. Things can be true without being supported by experimental evidence, of course, but the lack of support must surely be some kind of wake-up call to re-think our assumptions.
• The previous evidence suggesting that perspective-taking instructions increase empathy appeared to do so only because they were being compared against “remain objective” instructions, which do, in fact, reduce empathy.
• It does appear that we know how to restrain people from feeling empathy: just tell them to remain objective and ignore how the needy person might be feeling.

Reference: McAuliffe, W. H. B., Carter, E. C., Berhane, J., Snihur, A. C., & McCullough, M. E. (2019). Is Empathy the Default Response to Suffering? A Meta-Analytic Evaluation of Perspective Taking’s Effect on Empathic Concern. Personality and Social Psychology Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868319887599