I suspect most of you will have heard the news that former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher died this week.  A polemic figure of world politics throughout the 80’s, many of her critics charge her with responsibility for the rise in individualism and selfishness they see in society.

Most of that comes from Thatcher’s famous ‘no such thing as society’ comment.  It’s worth remembering the context of that speech however, and in particular her last sentence

There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.

There have been many studies looking into altruism and how it occurs, not least when there is a group of people in a position to help.  A nice example of this is the bystander effect, where a group of people ignore the distressed even though only one of them need offer assistance.  The feeling is that there are lots of others that can do the deed, so I don’t need to do anything myself.

Some new research by the University of Missouri set out to explore just how influential groups are when it comes to helping others.

“In our study, individuals who didn’t want to share money tended to influence others to not share money,” says Karthik Panchanathan, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri.

“We don’t know what psychological mechanism caused that, but perhaps potential givers did not want to be ‘suckers,’ who gave up their money while someone else got away with giving nothing. Selfish behavior in others may have given individuals an opportunity to escape any moral obligation to share that they might have felt.”

The study has implications for how non-profit organisations can effectively go about their fundraising, with an emphasis placed on the personal aspect of charitable giving.  The bystander effect is so powerful because people assume that there are others available to lend a hand, so they need not bother.  Organisations need therefore to make it clear that individual contributions do matter.

The study consisted of three seperate experiments, although each had a consistent core that saw participants given money that they could either give to others or keep for themselves.

The first experiment allowed no communication between givers, with people acted either on their own or in groups of two or three.  They found that those acting on their own gave the most money compared not only to the other groups, but indeed when compared to every group in all three experiments.  Recipients were given nearly double what they received from those within a group.

The second experiment shifted things slightly by allowing donors to see both who had donated and what they had donated, but they were forbidden from actually communicating with them.  The final experiment added that communication layer to the mix, allowing donors to send text messages to each other.  This however had the consequence that resulted in the largest number of pairs donating nothing at all.

“Communication among givers and knowledge of others’ donation amounts increased the variability in the quantity of money given,” says Panchanathan. “We had hypothesized that the ability to reason with the other givers would have encouraged more equitable distribution of money, but instead we found that it resulted in some groups giving very little and others giving significantly more.”

To find out why this happened, participants were asked a series of questions to classify them as either pro-self or pro-social.  Pro-self people tended to prefer keeping money for themselves, whilst pro-social types were more likely to give money to others.

What’s interesting was that when pro-self people were teamed with pro-social people, it tended to be the pro-self person whose opinion dominated.

“The pro-socials caved to the pro-selfs,” says Panchanathan. “Generally, people who started off refusing to give anything would not budge. If one person gave nothing, their partner would tend to reduce the amount they gave, even if that partner had originally argued for giving a larger sum.”

All of which gives donating a game theory’esq air, where no one wants to be suckered into giving whilst others ‘freeload’.