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

Looking good by doing good[Jan 15th 2009]
Economics focus
Looking good by doing good
Jan 15th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Rewarding people for their generosity may be counterproductive
Illustration by Jac Depczyk A LARGE plaque in the foyer of Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA), a museum housed in a dramatic glass and metal building on the harbour’s edge, identifies its most generous patron s. Visitors who stop to look will notice that some donors—including two who gave the ICA over $2.5m—have chosen not to 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 ICA’s patrons) want their good deeds to be talked about. In “Richistan”, a book on America’s new rich, Robert Frank writes of the several society publications in Florida’s Palm Beach which exist largely to publicise the charity of its well-heeled residents (at least before Bernard Madoff’s 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 understanding 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 chunk of this comes from plutocrat s 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 9m full-time jobs. Tax break s 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 intrigue d, and have identified several reasons to explain good deeds of this kind. Tax breaks are, of
course, one of the main ones, 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 good 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 into how 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 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 this, 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 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 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 model of two economists, Roland Benabou, of Princeton University, and Jean Tirole, of Toulouse University’s Institut d’Economie 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 someone getting paid for donating blood, for example, would find it hard to differentiate between the donor’s intrinsic “goodness” and his greed.
Blood money
The 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 colleagues demonstrate a mechanism through which such confound ing effects could operate. They presumed that the addition of a monetary incentive should have much less of an impact in public (where it muddle s the image signal of an action) than in private (where the image is not important). By adding a monetary reward for participants to their
experiment, the academics were able to confirm their hypothesis. In private, being paid to click increased effort from 548 clicks to 740, but in public, there was next to no effect. The trio also raise the possibility that cleverly designed rewards could actually draw out more generosity by exploiting image motivation. Suppose, for example, that rewards were used to encourage people to support a certain cause with a minimum donation. If that cause then publicised those who were generous well beyond the minimum required of them, it would show that they were not just “in it for the money”. Behavioural economics may yet provide charities with some creative new fund-raising techniques.
寻找好行善[ 2009年1月15日]
经济焦点
寻找好行善
2009年1月15日
来自经济学人印刷版
回报人民的慷慨可能会适得其反
插图由江淮Depczyk
在波士顿当代艺术学院（ICA ），装在一个巨大的玻璃和金属建筑海港的边缘博物馆大厅一个大匾，确定其最慷慨的赞助人。

谁停下来看看的游客会发现，一些捐助者，其中包括两名是谁给了ICA的超过250万美元，已选择不透露他们的名字。

这种沉默是不寻常的：私人礼物给慈善机构的不到1％是匿名的。

大多数人（包括ICA的主顾绝大多数），希望他们的善行被谈论。

在“Richistan ”一书中对美国的新富，罗伯特·弗兰克写在佛罗里达州棕榈滩的存在主要是为了宣传其富有的居民（以慈善的几个社会出版物的至少前伯纳德·麦道夫涉嫌庞氏骗局留下他们中的一些与小左给）。

事实证明，私人和公共慷慨之间的区别是理解什么促使人们把钱给慈善机构或献血，它的作用是昂贵的实干家，主要造福他人帮助。

这种行为很普遍，而且越来越多。

该十亿$ 306美国人给了慈善事业在2007年的三倍以上捐赠在1965年的金额。

虽然这很大一部分来自像比尔·盖茨和沃伦·巴菲特，他的慈善事业备受关注富豪，谦虚仔也给他们的时间和金钱的慷慨。

2001年的一项调查发现，美国家庭的89 ％给了慈善事业，和成人的44 ％自愿9m的全职工作当量。

减税解释一些陌生人的仁慈。

但绝不是全部。

经济学家，谁倾向于认为自我利益支配的人大部分动作，都好奇，并已确定了几个理由来解释这种善行。

减税是的，当然，主要的人之一，但捐助者有时也直接为他们的痛苦付出和感谢信的单纯的思想就足以说服别人咳出。

有些人甚至充当出于纯粹的利他主义。

但最有趣的是另一种解释，这是人们做的好，部分是因为它使他们看起来好于那些意见，他们所关心的。

经济学家称之为“形象的动机”。

杜克大学的丹阿雷利，特拉维夫大学解剖学的Bracha和哥伦比亚大学的Stephan Meier法所追求的，通过实验，以测试图像动机的重要性，以及为深入了解不同的激励因素如何相互作用的。

他们的研究结果，他们在一个新的文件*报告，表明图像动机问题很多，至少在实验室。

更有趣的是，他们发现的证据表明，货币激励实际上可以减少慈善捐赠，当人们被看好在别人眼中的渴望驱动部分。

关于慈善的形象建设的一种手段关键的东西，当然，它可以工作只有别人知道这件事，并认为有问题的慈善机构的积极评价。

因此，学者认为，人们应该给予更多的时候他们的行动是公开的。

为了测试这一点，他们进行了一项实验，其中的时间和参加人数单击确定多少钱，捐给代表他们向美国红十字会电脑按键的尴尬组合。

由于参与者的92 ％的人认为红十字高度，给予它可以合理地假定，使人们看好他们的同龄人。

人被随机分配到一个私人组，其中只有参与者知道捐款的数额，或公共团体，其中参与者不得不站出来在会议结束时，与该组分享这些信息。

符合这一假设形象要紧，参与者施加更大的努力，公众的情况下：平均点击次数，在900 ，是517的点击次数近一倍私营个案平均。

然而，学术界想去了一步。

在这方面，他们由两位经济学家罗兰Benabou ，普林斯顿大学，和吉恩梯若尔，图卢兹大学的研究所德ECONOMIE工业公司，谁形式化的想法，如果人们行善好看，引入货币或理论模型，影响其他奖励进入组合可能使问题复杂化。

谁看到有人得到报酬献血的观察员，例如，将很难对捐赠者的内在“善”和他的贪婪区分。

血钱
有观点认为，金钱奖励可能会适得其反，至少自1970年以来，当理查德Titmuss ，英国的社会科学家，科学家的假设，支付人来献血会降低血液中，他们给量已经出现。

但阿雷利先生和他的同事证明，通过它这种混杂影响可以运作的机制。

他们推测，除了一个货币激励的应具有小得多的冲击中公开（其中它muddles一个动作的图象信号）比在私人（其中图像是不重要的）。

通过增加金钱奖励，让参加者自己的实验中，学者们能够证实他们的假设。

在民间，被支付单击努力增加从548点击次数740 ，但在公共场合，还有旁边没有效果。

三人还提高了设计巧妙的回报其实可以绘制出更慷慨通过利用图像的动机的可能性。

假设，例如，奖励被用来鼓励人们支持某种原因以最小的捐赠。

如果说事业再公布那些谁是慷慨的远远超出了他们的最低要求，那就表明他们“在它的钱”不只是。

行为经济学还可能成为慈善机构一些有创意的新的筹资技术。