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1、【精品文档】如有侵权，请联系网站删除，仅供学习与交流新发展大学英语阅读与写作4课文翻译Looking good by doing good寻找好行善.精品文档.Looking good by doing goodJan 15th 2009Economics focusLooking good by doing goodJan 15th 2009From The Economist print editionRewarding people for their generosity may be counterproductiveIllustration by Jac DepczykA LARG
2、E plaque in the foyer of Bostons Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA), a museum housed in a dramatic glass and metal building on the harbours edge, identifies its most generous patrons. Visitors who stop to look will notice that some donorsincluding two who gave the ICA over $2.5mhave chosen not to
3、reveal their names. Such reticence is unusual: less than 1% of private gifts to charity are anonymous. Most people (including the vast majority of the ICAs patrons) want their good deeds to be talked about. In “Richistan”, a book on Americas new rich, Robert Frank writes of the several society publi
4、cations in Floridas Palm Beach which exist largely to publicise the charity of its well-heeled residents (at least before Bernard Madoffs alleged Ponzi scheme left some of them with little left to give).As it turns out, the distinction between private and public generosity is helpful in understandin
5、g what motivates people to give money to charities or donate blood, acts which are costly to the doer and primarily benefit others. Such actions are widespread, and growing. The $306 billion that Americans gave to charity in 2007 was more than triple the amount donated in 1965. And though a big chun
6、k of this comes from plutocrats like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, whose philanthropy has attracted much attention, modest earners also give generously of their time and money. A 2001 survey found that 89% of American households gave to charity, and that 44% of adults volunteered the equivalent of
7、9m full-time jobs. Tax breaks explain some of the kindness of strangers. But by no means all.Economists, who tend to think self-interest governs most actions of man, are intrigued, and have identified several reasons to explain good deeds of this kind. Tax breaks are, of course, one of the main ones
8、, but donors are also sometimes paid directly for their pains, and the mere thought of a thank-you letter can be enough to persuade others to cough up. Some even act out of sheer altruism. But most interesting is another explanation, which is that people do good in part because it makes them look go
9、od to those whose opinions they care about. Economists call this “image motivation”.Dan Ariely of Duke University, Anat Bracha of Tel Aviv University, and Stephan Meier of Columbia University sought, through experiments, to test the importance of image motivation, as well as to gain insights intohow
10、 different motivating factors interact. Their results, which they report in a new paper*, suggest that image motivation matters a lot, at least in the laboratory. Even more intriguingly, they find evidence that monetary incentives can actually reduce charitable giving when people are driven in part
11、by a desire to look good in others eyes.The crucial thing about charity as a means of image building is, of course, that it can work only if others know about it and think positively of the charity in question. So, the academics argue, people should give more when their actions are public.To test th
12、is, they conducted an experiment where the number of times participants clicked an awkward combination of computer keys determined how much money was donated on their behalf to the American Red Cross. Since 92% of participants thought highly of the Red Cross, giving to it could reasonably be assumed
13、 to make people look good to their peers. People were randomly assigned to either a private group, where only the participant knew the amount of the donation, or a public group, where the participant had to stand up at the end of the session and share this information with the group. Consistent with
14、 the hypothesis that image mattered, participants exerted much greater effort in the public case: the average number of clicks, at 900, was nearly double the average of 517 clicks in the private case.However, the academics wanted to go a step further. In this, they were influenced by the theoretical
15、 model of two economists, Roland Benabou, of Princeton University, and Jean Tirole, of Toulouse Universitys Institut dEconomie Industrielle, who formalised the idea that if people do good to look good, introducing monetary or other rewards into the mix might complicate matters. An observer who sees
16、someone getting paid for donating blood, for example, would find it hard to differentiate between the donors intrinsic “goodness” and his greed.Blood moneyThe idea that monetary incentives could be counterproductive has been around at least since 1970, when Richard Titmuss, a British social scientist, hypothesised that paying people to donate blood would reduce the amount of blood that they gave. But Mr Ariely and his colleague
