The Life You Can Save: How To Do Your Part To End World Poverty

The second of the four parts of the book concerns human nature. First, Singer investigates the psychological reasons why human beings don’t give more in foreign aid.

Singer first examines the human proclivity for self-interested behavior. He describes a psychological experiment with two test subjects and two tasks. One task is labeled interesting and engaging; the other is supposedly boring. Most subjects agree that the moral course of action is to flip a coin in order to determine which subject performs which task. However, when given the choice, many people either don’t flip the coin or lie about the results so as to receive the more pleasant, engaging assignment. Despite this clearly self-interested result, Singer notes that people do plenty of altruistic things of no obvious benefit to themselves. Singer writes that there are psychological factors at stake that self-interest cannot explain away.

Singer writes that other experiments show people respond with strong altruistic emotions when there is an identifiable victim. People are more likely to give if they know they can change the life of a single person with a distinct identity—a phenomenon known as the “identifiable victim effect.” They donate less to causes in which there are large numbers of unidentified persons in need, even if the need is more substantial: “[T]he subjects of the experiment reported feeling stronger emotions when told about one child than when told about two” (47). This effect indicates why altruistic people do not give to the most utilitarian or pragmatic causes.

Singer adopts the language of psychologist Paul Slovic to explain this phenomenon. He discusses the affective system, which grasps reality emotionally, and the deliberative system, which “draws on our reasoning abilities” (48). Specific, identifiable victims tug at the altruistic sensibilities of an individual’s affective (or emotional) system. This neurological response acts more quickly than the conscious, deliberative system. The deliberative system takes the time to reflect on abstract quantities in order to make the most logical decision.

The next psychological factor that explains the lack of rational gift-giving is the tendency to parochialism, or tribal narrow-mindedness. For reasons grounded in evolutionary psychology, humans give more naturally to people they perceive as kin. Singer cites evidence of humans giving more—by a wide margin—in emergency relief within their own country than they give to international relief. He also notes that it is only very recently that international aid has even become tenable.

Then Singer discusses “futile thinking” (53). The sense of futility also flows from the affective system response. This occurs when potential givers feel that giving would be futile because of the low percentage of people whom aid could help. This has paradoxical effects:

The implication is that people will give more support for saving 80 percent of 100 lives at risk than for saving 20 percent of 1,000 lives at risk—in other words, for saving 80 lives rather than for saving 200 lives, even when the cost of saving each group is the same (53).

Futility reduces the chances that an individual will give even when they could do exceptional good.

The diffusion of responsibility, in which many people are equally responsible for aid, also reduces giving. A person is less likely to do their part when they know that there are many others who could/should also help. This relates to another psychological factor: the sense of fairness. Singer notes economic experiments that indicate that humans’ sense of fairness is so strong that they would sometimes rather come away with a net loss than inequitably distributed winnings. Applied to aid this may show why some people do not contribute their “fair share” to a global problem: They know (or suspect) that others will not contribute.

It is also the case that the only way most people can contribute to the extremely needy is through financial contribution. There are psychological experiments that reveal that the introduction of money to a situation causes people to feel more self-sufficient, isolated, and antisocial, so the fact that international aid requires financial gift-giving may contribute to people’s reticence. Singer discusses an experiment in which a group that was continuously prompted to think about money donated considerably less money than a control group that was not prompted to think about money. The implication is that brooding about money makes people more financially self-conscious and stingy.

Singer challenges the moral legitimacy of these various psychological factors. They may all have some kind of intuitive appeal, but that does not make them grounds for moral (in)action. Deliberative, reflective thought, even when unintuitive, is morally necessary. Some have suggested that in the absence of these intuitive emotional factors, people will not give even if they know they should. Singer provides evidence from personal experience to prove otherwise. After writing a utilitarian argument in favor of greater international aid in an article in The New York Times, Singer discovered that aid agencies whose phone numbers he included in the article experienced a nontrivial increase in donations for months afterwards. This experience helped prompt Singer to write The Life You Can Save. The book itself, then, is a practical device for increasing aid.