Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Children Prove to be Irrational and Altruistic at a Younger Age
When economists analyze what they believe to be rational, they often weigh the costs and the benefits to decide if it would be rational to participate or contribute to an activity. Sometimes individuals contribute or participate in an activity because they are altruistic, even though it is not rational for them to do so. This article in the Wall Street Journal analyzes if altruism begins when children are young, in this case three to four years old, and how this affects the decisions they make. Typical research has said that younger children are not altruistic and only become so when they become older and have “stronger notions of morality.” However, this study found that the majority of the three and four years olds expressed altruistic tendencies when they chose to give up some of the stickers they were given to an unknown child who they were told did not have any stickers.
There are two topics from class that seem to be relevant to this study. The first is Coase and his work on the “Coasian Solution” where beneficiaries of a public good pool together their resources depending on their willingness to pay in order to provide the good. The issues that arise from this theorem are the holdout problem and the free rider problem, where it is more rational for some individuals to abstain from contributing to the provision of the good if enough other people pay and get the good provided without them having to contribute. As mentioned in the article, the only way to prevent the free rider and holdout problem is to make sure the people that benefit from the good are altruistic, so even if it is not rational for them to contribute to the provision of the good because it will be provided anyway, it is morally right for them to contribute so they do so anyway. Another instance where abstaining from contributing is rational is Johnson’s article on voting where it is irrational for people to vote when weighing the costs and benefits, but people do so anyway because people see it altruistically as their duty. Therefore, if the study holds true and children are showing altruistic tendencies at a younger age than previously thought, maybe we can expect a lot less free riders and a lot more voters in the future.
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1 comment:
Dagney, you've made an interesting connection in this article. Altruism and the holdout and free rider problems are definitely linked, in the sense that altruism may decrease their effects.
However, if we look at the problem that the Coasian solution tries to address in the first place, an increase in altruism might actually have an even greater effect than even you described. The entire purpose of the Coasian solution is really to give property rights to a single party in order to solve a public goods problem, such as with the steel plant polluting the river that fishermen use. A truly great increase in altruism might actually have the effect of making it so that the steel plant doesn't pollute the river at all, despite the effect it may have on the plant's profits, because of the sense of altruism that the plant owners feel towards the fishermen.
The connection you've made between voting and altruism is also interesting. I'm not sure if I'd call it altruism that makes people vote; I'd probably argue that it's more of a sense of peer pressure or civic duty. However, altruism might be involved in an increase in voting if people offer to give rides to the polls, or if a boss decides not to penalize his workers for leaving work early to go to the polls.
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