Ever since the ice-bucket challenge swept the Internet this summer, raising more than $115 million for A.L.S. research, a legion of imitators has sprung up to try and cash in themselves. In the approaching holiday season, as fund-raising appeals swell, we can now smash a pie in our faces, snap selfies first thing in the morning or take a photo of ourselves grabbing our crotches, among other tasteful gestures, to express solidarity with various worthy causes. But the failure of these newer gimmicks to enjoy anywhere near the same popularity as the frigid original demonstrates the peculiar and finicky nature of our altruism — a psychological puzzle that both scientists and economists are trying to decipher. (...)
Most charitable efforts elicit our sympathy by showing us photographs of the afflicted and telling us tales of suffering. But just as people avert their eyes from beggars, most of us can shift our attention from stuff that depresses us. One great curiosity, and advantage, of the ice-bucket challenge was that it did very little to remind us of the disease that was its supposed inspiration.
Fund-raising professionals hoping to decode the magic of the challenge, however, will be dispirited to learn that this master game plan wasn’t exactly intentional. According to Josh Levin, a writer at Slate, the challenge appears to have instead emerged spontaneously from similar dares, like “polar plunges” into ice-cold lakes. At first, it simply consisted of using social media to dare others to dump a pail of ice water over themselves. Later, participants began donating $100 to any of a wide variety of charities. It became linked to A.L.S. only later, when a couple of pro golfers took the challenge and chose that as their good cause.
Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist at Princeton University who has researched attitude change, thinks several factors allowed the ice-bucket challenge to become a viral and fund-raising sensation. Its public nature forced people to either accept the task or suffer damage to their reputations. Other stimulants to action included peer pressure from friends, the “helper’s high” that results from aiding others and the fortuitous participation of celebrities like Bill Gates and Katy Perry. Particularly crucial was the 24-hour deadline that the challenge gave to either drench oneself or shell out."When you make people set specific goals, they become more likely to change behavior,” van der Linden told me. “People like setting goals, and they like achieving goals.”
Two additional features were particularly clever, according to van der Linden. One was the ingenious way that the challenge fed our collective narcissism by allowing us to celebrate with selfies or videos of our drenched faces and bodies on Facebook and Twitter. An even deeper motivation may have been the precisely calibrated amount of self-sacrifice involved. “If you’re going to elicit money from people, it helps to have some way of doing it that is at least slightly painful, since that makes the whole experience about more than just giving away what may be a relatively trivial amount of money,” van der Linden said.
Most charitable efforts elicit our sympathy by showing us photographs of the afflicted and telling us tales of suffering. But just as people avert their eyes from beggars, most of us can shift our attention from stuff that depresses us. One great curiosity, and advantage, of the ice-bucket challenge was that it did very little to remind us of the disease that was its supposed inspiration.Fund-raising professionals hoping to decode the magic of the challenge, however, will be dispirited to learn that this master game plan wasn’t exactly intentional. According to Josh Levin, a writer at Slate, the challenge appears to have instead emerged spontaneously from similar dares, like “polar plunges” into ice-cold lakes. At first, it simply consisted of using social media to dare others to dump a pail of ice water over themselves. Later, participants began donating $100 to any of a wide variety of charities. It became linked to A.L.S. only later, when a couple of pro golfers took the challenge and chose that as their good cause.
Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist at Princeton University who has researched attitude change, thinks several factors allowed the ice-bucket challenge to become a viral and fund-raising sensation. Its public nature forced people to either accept the task or suffer damage to their reputations. Other stimulants to action included peer pressure from friends, the “helper’s high” that results from aiding others and the fortuitous participation of celebrities like Bill Gates and Katy Perry. Particularly crucial was the 24-hour deadline that the challenge gave to either drench oneself or shell out."When you make people set specific goals, they become more likely to change behavior,” van der Linden told me. “People like setting goals, and they like achieving goals.”
Two additional features were particularly clever, according to van der Linden. One was the ingenious way that the challenge fed our collective narcissism by allowing us to celebrate with selfies or videos of our drenched faces and bodies on Facebook and Twitter. An even deeper motivation may have been the precisely calibrated amount of self-sacrifice involved. “If you’re going to elicit money from people, it helps to have some way of doing it that is at least slightly painful, since that makes the whole experience about more than just giving away what may be a relatively trivial amount of money,” van der Linden said.
by Ian McGugan, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Joon Mo Kang
