Incentivizing Altruism

One of the most interesting things about altruism is it can often be tricky to motivate people to help each other out. There are two main kinds of motivation for altruism, egotism and empathy, and there is often a great deal over which is more prominent in any given scenario. Egotism-motivated altruism occurs when people seek some kind of personal benefit through helping others. Some examples of benefits include social rewards and lessening guilt or distress. Empathic-motivated altruism occurs out of trying to help people due to actually feeling empathy from perceiving a need in others.

Rather than relate any of this to our current state of affairs, I thought I might reminisce and think back to how some of this related to my summer job as a camp counselor (a situation as far removed from this one as I can think of). One of the things I did in that job was teach sailing on our small lake. It tends to be a fairly popular activity, with a lot of kids with varying levels of experience signing up for it every day. It’s a small camp with a limited number of staff members, though, so often times I would wind up the only adult there with any knowledge of how to use those deceptively simple boats. So to compensate for this, I would enlist the help of the older more experienced campers (who usually were between 13 and 15) in teaching the younger less experienced ones (who could be anywhere from 8 to 12). Teenage boys are not the easiest group of people to motivate, though, so there had to be some kind of system in place to incentivize them to actually try to teach younger kids the basics of sailing. That’s where ranks come into play. There are a series of ranks and awards that the kids receive for showing first that they know the basics, then that they can be trusted to take out boats without a counselor, and further down the line as they get more advanced. These kids tend to love getting these ranks, and they’re made all the more special by the fact that not many kids actually go to the activity enough to earn them. A key component of earning them, however, is paying it forward and helping out the younger kids. I, as the counselor, always made this clear to them, and so most of the time they would assist me in teaching a wider group of people how to sail. This is essentially an example of egotism-motivated altruism, where I (and indeed all counselors before me) rewarded them for helping others.