Seriously.

I guess by your (apparent) definition the true altruists here would be the few students who gave money but didn't experience a "warm glow" after doing so.

I guess that would be true.

There is a lot going on here, some not covered in this item or the actual report of the research.

Every society needs public goods, but the mechanisms used to fund them vary. For example, taxation and government spending are lower in the United States than in most European countries, but philanthropy is higher (1). To economists, this charitable giving is a puzzle: Money is a good, so why are people willing to give it away? One possible explanation is in terms of a "pure altruism" motive (2). Individuals with such a motive receive satisfaction from increases in a public good, such as the provision of basic services to the needy. This altruistic concern provides a motive to give, but there is also an incentive to keep money for oneself, because the cost of such charity is entirely paid by the giver, whereas the benefits are spread out over all those people who care about the needy....A second possible motive for charitable giving is the sense of agency associated with the act of voluntary giving. This reward from giving has been termed "warm glow" (3, 4). If givers were driven exclusively by the warm-glow motive, they should derive satisfaction from making a voluntary gift, rather than from the increase in the level of the public good itself. On the other hand, taxation should not produce a warm glow, because paying taxes typically does not involve a voluntary choice.

One thing not mentioned here is perception. In this experiment, there was absolute perception ofg the good. But it may not be so obvious that one's taxers are going to good. So one's little story one tells oneself about taxes may be important for developing a warm glow.

Another thing that I'd like to see studied is what sociologists sometimes call "spite." Technically, spite arises when unrelated animals are killed or harmed in such a way that one's fitness is raised, usually because one's relatives benefit. One can imagine a situation where spite increasews fitness even though it may come at a cost to oneself. Taxation may fall into this class. The many impassioned to tax the rich seem like spite, and sometimes these arguments are made by people who would suffer from the tax increase. In fact, almost all tax increases eventually affect the middle class, so sometimes it seems that the call for higher taxes for "the public good" may just be spite. It may be the crab pot phenomenon.

I was going to quote from the actual report, but maybe I'll save that.

Another avenue is study whether the "warm glow" is addictive, as are many activating stimuli in the areas activated. Those who react more to giving, relatively, and those who react as "pure altruists" would be more likely to be addicted, the pure altruists because they have more activating events.

Discussed in the article are "egoists," whose activation for receiving money is very high, and have less of a tendency to give it away.

It reminds me of what the good kid I grew up with once said, "It's always been easy for me to be good, it just seemed natural. To me, a saint iis someone who has not endency to do good, but overcomes this lack of tendency or even a tendency to do evil to do the right thing."

Maybe I'll write this up.

In America, philanthropy (see quote above) is often a source of resentment, based on the notion that the philanthropist gets to choose where he puts his money, but the taxpayer does not. Given that we typically lesson taxes based on charitable giving, the common taxpayer can sometimes be raised to calls for spite. Years ago, on Phil Donahue's daytime show, he had as a guest a man who had paid no taxes the year before despite making millions. The reason was that he had given so muuch money to charity that it had canceled his tax burden. It turned out that he had to give about four times the amount of the taxes he would have paid to cancel it. He listed his charities, and all in Phil's audience agreed that they were good causes, and that they paralleled in almost all cases government programs.

Yet the audience quickly became an angry mob. The resentment was so thick that it was palpable. The one rational argument was that by not paying taxes, he had raised everyone else's taxes. The man admitted that this might be true, but pointed out that since he had contributed more money to parallel programs than his taxes would have been, the fault would lie with the politicians.

At one point he pleaded that it wasn't as if he had any use of the money, meaning that he had the same relationship to his donated money that the audience had with their taxes. The audience was not mollified, and it was apparent that they resented his ability to direct his donations. The calculus seemed to be that the ability to direct where the money that you can't use us spent is worth much more than four times what you would pay for taxes, and so the man who paid no taxes got off cheap. I wonder what the audience thought the true value was? Seven times? Twelve times? A hundred times?

I wonder if some limited ability to earmark one's taxes might make us feel better, and less spiteful.