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.doc

Looking good by doing goodJan 15th 2009Economics focusLooking good by doing goodJan 15th 2009From The Economist print editionRewarding people for their generosity may be counterproductiveIllustration by Jac DepczykA LARGE plaque in the foyer of Bostons Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA), a museum housed in a dramatic glass and metal building on the harbours edge, identifies its most generous patrons. Visitors who stop to look will notice that some donorsincluding two who gave the ICA over $2.5mhave 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 ICAs patrons) want their good deeds to be talked about. In “Richistan”, a book on Americas new rich, Robert Frank writes of the several society publications in Floridas Palm Beach which exist largely to publicise the charity of its well-heeled residents (at least before Bernard Madoffs 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 plutocrats 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 breaks 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 intrigued, 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 intohow 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 Universitys Institut dEconomie 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 donors intrinsic “goodness” and his greed.Blood moneyThe 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 confounding effects could operate. They presumed that the addition of a monetary incentive should have much less of an impact in public (where it muddles 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