how to spread human kindness so I’ve
been fascinated by the human L tourism
puzzle for a long time why are people
kind to one another and why do we
sometimes help each other at significant
personal cost well at other times we
leave people out in the cold there’s a
pervasive myth about human nature that
were inherently selfish that we only
care about our own interest and it’s
true there’s two dominant forces in
nature there’s competition and there’s
cooperation but we possibly couldn’t
have evolved as a species without the
capacity to cooperate in meaningful and
productive ways with each other
in fact now we have the opportunity to
connect billions of people worldwide
fast efficiently and at low cost through
online social media social contagion
effects allow the kindness of one person
to connect with another and spread
throughout a network and take over an
entire network and that’s what I refer
to as viral altruism one of my favorite
examples that have studied to illustrate
this idea of vile altruism is the ALS
ice bucket challenge how many of you
participated in the ice bucket challenge
that’s quite a decent lunch so this was
a campaign that went viral in
unprecedented ways in 2014 and the idea
was to raise awareness and support for a
rare progressive neurological disease
and the gist of the campaign was to pour
a bucket of ice cold water over your
head make a donation to ALS upload your
video nominate other people in your
network to do the same and then this
campaign took off and took over the
world hundreds of millions of people
participated worldwide videos were
watched over 10 billion times in the ALS
Association raised an additional 100
million dollars which was incredibly
important and so my story started when I
got a call from a journalist who was
writing a piece for the New York Times
and he asked me well you’re a
psychologist why did this campaign go
viral
I did it took over everyone’s attention
or at least most people’s attention at
least for a moment across various parts
of the world and I said let me think
about this and get back to you and so I
started thinking and as I thought about
the campaign more and more I realized
that the campaign was using some key
psychological lever some
well-established psychological
principles that undoubtedly helped
create the success of this campaign and
I started looking for other examples I
looked at the Save Darfur movement which
was an anti genocide campaign and it was
the largest collective movement on
Facebook at the time but also campaigns
like Movember which raise awareness for
men’s health issues the Facebook organ
donor initiative which allows people to
sign up as an organ donor and display
that to others in your network and I
quickly realized that among all of these
campaigns there were a few commonalities
in terms of the key ingredients that
went into their success and I started
collecting these and I collated this in
a framework I called smart altruism and
smart altruism has four key factors the
first is social influence the second is
moral imperative the third are affective
reactions or emotions and the fifth is
translational impact and I want to take
you through each of these and illustrate
their power especially when they’re
combined social influence lies at the
basis of human social interaction right
we always influence each other all the
time through social interaction but
there’s two key processes that are
really important one we call descriptive
influence or information about what
other people are doing right we pay
attention to what others are doing
because it may be useful and we use it
as a cue to guide our own behavior and
then there is prescriptive influence or
information about what other people that
we care about think that we ought to be
doing and what many of these campaigns
implicitly did knowingly or not is that
they combine these two forces to
maximize social power so in the case of
the ice bucket challenge you not only
saw many people in your own social
network participating in the
Payne illustrating you to you what’s
important at that time providing social
proof of what is a desirable behavior
but at the same time you were challenged
publicly to follow suit and here you see
a picture of Mark Zuckerberg being
challenged by chris Christie to
participate in the campaign and he in
turn nominated Bill Gates to participate
in the challenge and that is in fact
what sustained part of the campaign the
social nature of it the nomination
process that allow it to go viral
now the second key factor is moral
imperative we care about morality and we
do so deeply we get upset about social
injustice here you can see a picture of
the Save Darfur protest these were
protesters and one of the signs reads
you know what happens when we stand by
idle and someone has a number tattooed
on the lower arm which is a reference to
world war two people get upset about
injustice and suffering that happens to
other people and that can cause moral
outrage and moral outrage can also
spread online but it doesn’t all have to
be negative sometimes were inspired by
other people we all notice saying the
death of a single individual is a chatot
tragedy but the death of a million is a
statistic people care more about causes
where there is a clear person or
individual that we can relate to and
that symbolizes the nature of the
campaign we’ve all heard of the
unfortunate passing of Stephen Hawking
this week he was a beacon for ALS and
also this challenge in which he
participated and what’s amazing is that
despite this disease he is one of the
most famous and the most renowned
scientist in the world and that can be
inspiring to people as a role model
effective reactions are incredibly
important we all have emotions we all
read emotions in other people and we
know from lots of research that
emotional content is more likely to go
viral
especially positive emotional content
empathy is a basic mechanism that is
very closely related to our ability and
motivation to help other people there’s
emotional empathy which basically is
the instantaneous experience of feeling
what somebody else is feeling we read
expressions in other people’s faces
because we’re an inherently social
species and that allows us to directly
infer and experience the suffering of
others when we see a sad face we
experience that feeling but empathy also
has a cognitive component our ability to
take someone else’s perspective to step
into someone else’s shoes and predict
what they might be going through and we
know from research that helping other
people gives us a sense of warm glow it
makes us feel good and in turn makes us
more likely to help other people and
when that goes viral it can create a
positive collective sentiment that
encourages people to be kind to one
another
the last factor I want to talk about is
translational impact you see a cartoon
here that illustrates the idea of
clicktivism click here to save the world
and one of my key messages today is that
the nature of human altruism is changing
fundamentally as much of our behavior
moves from the offline to the online
environment there’s new ideas about how
to be kind to each other how to help
each other what does it click worth to
you what does a share worth is it the
same as opening up your wallet and
making a donation is it the same as
hugging someone else is it the same as
consoling somebody in person how many
likes does it take to get the
psychological equivalent of an in-person
compliment I don’t think we have good
answers to these questions yet but it’s
important because much and much of our
behavior is shifting online and in fact
there was another common pattern when I
analyzed these campaigns a key
behavioral characteristic of many of
these campaigns that underlies them that
I think is incredibly important and
symbolizes some of the problems with
viral altruism and this is what I called
the short half-life of viral altruism
just like the saying a candle that burns
twice as fast only burns half as long
what I observed was that after these
campaigns went viral when they reached
their peak they died out and there were
never to be heard from again
they dissipated and I think this says
something incredibly important about the
changing nature of human social
interaction and the way we think about
helping others and social causes that we
need to grapple with in more detail and
I’ll show you some evidence some data
they extracted from the campaign to try
to analyze its impact I looked at
various things like Google searches
Wikipedia heads donations and I want to
share that trend with you so the first
thing I looked at was the amount of
Google searches for things like what is
als do people get curious about the
campaign during the ice bucket challenge
I wanted well what happened before what
happened during and what happened after
and you see here that during the
campaign Google searches peaked they
exploded and then when the campaign
ended so that the pattern it completely
dissipated even when the campaign was
relaunched in 2015 you see the same for
Wikipedia hits so usually about 2 3,000
people visit the ALS Wikipedia page
during the campaign that spiked to about
500,000 it was a massive explosive
interest but what is the consequence
what is the cost of that massive
explosive interest the cost is that it
almost completely disappeared when the
campaign ended and so that the donations
I think it’s incredibly important that
this caused raised 100 million dollars
to fund important ALS research but
donations went back to their original
levels the year after the anti genocide
campaign very similar things happen most
people signed up very quickly in the
first few months and then people who
were recruited in to come into the
campaign never signed up anyone else
with the organ donor initiative most of
the registrations came in the first few
weeks and then it died off slowly so I
started wondering am I the only one
who’s observing these trends and perhaps
the importance of what that is saying
about how we’re changing the way they
were engaging with others and people in
other parts of the world and important
social causes and then I came across
this interesting publication that looked
at the Syrian refugee crisis and in fact
this is the Syrian death toll for
civilians in 2015 and peaked about
250,000 and these researchers found the
exact same thing here is Google searches
for the Syrian refugee crisis what it
means what’s happening in the world and
you see that peak
right around the same cycle and then it
fades from our memories if the suffering
of other people can fade so quickly from
our busy lives what does that say about
the way that we interact with each other
so my key question has been how can we
make it stick how can we make viral
altruism stick in the long term and it’s
an incredibly important and difficult
question part of the answer is that
perhaps we shouldn’t frame really
important causes as a challenge as a
short-term initiative
maybe that very act undermines what we
want from people in terms of long term
cooperation and engagement if you think
about long term social change positive
social change that affects everyone we
all need to contribute and we need to do
so in sustained ways but of course we
can’t contribute to everything
everyone’s busy we’re overloaded if we
would take in the suffering of everyone
we would be very very overwhelmed and so
how do we engage with this paradox my
reality isn’t bad in itself but we have
to recognize that when something goes
viral when you build social momentum
when you get everyone on the bandwagon
when there’s a signal that cuts through
the noise and more people join which is
social proof in itself that then
enhances the signal that social momentum
will peak and what comes up must
eventually go down so either we have to
recognize that that is a trend that we
want or at some point we have to
transition and transform that initial
Vie reality into something more
meaningful into something more sustained
and engage in fact together with the
social metrics company we looked at
YouTube videos of the ice bucket
challenge and see what people were doing
and we were coding different elements of
the videos and what we found was that
many people didn’t even mention ALS in
the video most people don’t understand
that the entire purpose of throwing a
bucket of ice water over your head is to
freeze up your muscles to get an
experience of of the disease but what we
did found was those individuals who
actually mentioned ALS were 5 times more
likely to donate so a simple sentence
connecting the cause with the campaign
when people are able to identify and
define part of who they are as Paul
of a larger social movement that can
provide a more self-determined intrinsic
incentive to care about something in the
long term now I know everyone’s probably
familiar with the moral fable of the
hare and a turtle right the turtle
challenges the rabbit to a race and the
rabbit laughs and says sure let’s let’s
do it and of course as you would expect
the rabbit is fast and furious and he
bypasses the turtle very quickly
well then because he is fast and furious
and because he is so intense and
explosive he gets very hot and tired and
he decides to take a nap and he figured
even if the turtle surpasses me I’ll
still be faster and make it to the
finish line
of course he overslept in a turtle was
waiting for him at the finish line but
perhaps the key message here isn’t
necessarily competition perhaps the key
message here is cooperation there turtle
is a beautiful animal in itself it has
unique characteristics yes it’s slow but
it does important things and we can
appreciate it for that same for the
rabbit it’s fast and it can achieve
different things sometimes we need fast
altruism perhaps there’s a purpose of
that and so to me smart altruism what I
mean by smart is that it’s both fast and
slow and there’s different purposes for
fast and slow altruism sometimes fast
altruism means that we need to act now
maybe a natural disaster happens we need
immediate relief and that’s where fast
altruism can be useful it can be won off
that’s okay
other things are climate change public
health serious things that determine the
future of our planet that’s where we
need people to cooperate in the long
term and you already saw here that I
like to change the ending of this famous
moral fable this is a picture of a baby
rabbit and a turtle working together and
I think instead of competing this is the
real message that in order to move
forward especially in times when faith
and one another is wavering I think we
need to remind ourselves that in most
situations were better off together and
that we need to pull each other over the
finish line thank you
you [Applause]
been fascinated by the human L tourism
puzzle for a long time why are people
kind to one another and why do we
sometimes help each other at significant
personal cost well at other times we
leave people out in the cold there’s a
pervasive myth about human nature that
were inherently selfish that we only
care about our own interest and it’s
true there’s two dominant forces in
nature there’s competition and there’s
cooperation but we possibly couldn’t
have evolved as a species without the
capacity to cooperate in meaningful and
productive ways with each other
in fact now we have the opportunity to
connect billions of people worldwide
fast efficiently and at low cost through
online social media social contagion
effects allow the kindness of one person
to connect with another and spread
throughout a network and take over an
entire network and that’s what I refer
to as viral altruism one of my favorite
examples that have studied to illustrate
this idea of vile altruism is the ALS
ice bucket challenge how many of you
participated in the ice bucket challenge
that’s quite a decent lunch so this was
a campaign that went viral in
unprecedented ways in 2014 and the idea
was to raise awareness and support for a
rare progressive neurological disease
and the gist of the campaign was to pour
a bucket of ice cold water over your
head make a donation to ALS upload your
video nominate other people in your
network to do the same and then this
campaign took off and took over the
world hundreds of millions of people
participated worldwide videos were
watched over 10 billion times in the ALS
Association raised an additional 100
million dollars which was incredibly
important and so my story started when I
got a call from a journalist who was
writing a piece for the New York Times
and he asked me well you’re a
psychologist why did this campaign go
viral
I did it took over everyone’s attention
or at least most people’s attention at
least for a moment across various parts
of the world and I said let me think
about this and get back to you and so I
started thinking and as I thought about
the campaign more and more I realized
that the campaign was using some key
psychological lever some
well-established psychological
principles that undoubtedly helped
create the success of this campaign and
I started looking for other examples I
looked at the Save Darfur movement which
was an anti genocide campaign and it was
the largest collective movement on
Facebook at the time but also campaigns
like Movember which raise awareness for
men’s health issues the Facebook organ
donor initiative which allows people to
sign up as an organ donor and display
that to others in your network and I
quickly realized that among all of these
campaigns there were a few commonalities
in terms of the key ingredients that
went into their success and I started
collecting these and I collated this in
a framework I called smart altruism and
smart altruism has four key factors the
first is social influence the second is
moral imperative the third are affective
reactions or emotions and the fifth is
translational impact and I want to take
you through each of these and illustrate
their power especially when they’re
combined social influence lies at the
basis of human social interaction right
we always influence each other all the
time through social interaction but
there’s two key processes that are
really important one we call descriptive
influence or information about what
other people are doing right we pay
attention to what others are doing
because it may be useful and we use it
as a cue to guide our own behavior and
then there is prescriptive influence or
information about what other people that
we care about think that we ought to be
doing and what many of these campaigns
implicitly did knowingly or not is that
they combine these two forces to
maximize social power so in the case of
the ice bucket challenge you not only
saw many people in your own social
network participating in the
Payne illustrating you to you what’s
important at that time providing social
proof of what is a desirable behavior
but at the same time you were challenged
publicly to follow suit and here you see
a picture of Mark Zuckerberg being
challenged by chris Christie to
participate in the campaign and he in
turn nominated Bill Gates to participate
in the challenge and that is in fact
what sustained part of the campaign the
social nature of it the nomination
process that allow it to go viral
now the second key factor is moral
imperative we care about morality and we
do so deeply we get upset about social
injustice here you can see a picture of
the Save Darfur protest these were
protesters and one of the signs reads
you know what happens when we stand by
idle and someone has a number tattooed
on the lower arm which is a reference to
world war two people get upset about
injustice and suffering that happens to
other people and that can cause moral
outrage and moral outrage can also
spread online but it doesn’t all have to
be negative sometimes were inspired by
other people we all notice saying the
death of a single individual is a chatot
tragedy but the death of a million is a
statistic people care more about causes
where there is a clear person or
individual that we can relate to and
that symbolizes the nature of the
campaign we’ve all heard of the
unfortunate passing of Stephen Hawking
this week he was a beacon for ALS and
also this challenge in which he
participated and what’s amazing is that
despite this disease he is one of the
most famous and the most renowned
scientist in the world and that can be
inspiring to people as a role model
effective reactions are incredibly
important we all have emotions we all
read emotions in other people and we
know from lots of research that
emotional content is more likely to go
viral
especially positive emotional content
empathy is a basic mechanism that is
very closely related to our ability and
motivation to help other people there’s
emotional empathy which basically is
the instantaneous experience of feeling
what somebody else is feeling we read
expressions in other people’s faces
because we’re an inherently social
species and that allows us to directly
infer and experience the suffering of
others when we see a sad face we
experience that feeling but empathy also
has a cognitive component our ability to
take someone else’s perspective to step
into someone else’s shoes and predict
what they might be going through and we
know from research that helping other
people gives us a sense of warm glow it
makes us feel good and in turn makes us
more likely to help other people and
when that goes viral it can create a
positive collective sentiment that
encourages people to be kind to one
another
the last factor I want to talk about is
translational impact you see a cartoon
here that illustrates the idea of
clicktivism click here to save the world
and one of my key messages today is that
the nature of human altruism is changing
fundamentally as much of our behavior
moves from the offline to the online
environment there’s new ideas about how
to be kind to each other how to help
each other what does it click worth to
you what does a share worth is it the
same as opening up your wallet and
making a donation is it the same as
hugging someone else is it the same as
consoling somebody in person how many
likes does it take to get the
psychological equivalent of an in-person
compliment I don’t think we have good
answers to these questions yet but it’s
important because much and much of our
behavior is shifting online and in fact
there was another common pattern when I
analyzed these campaigns a key
behavioral characteristic of many of
these campaigns that underlies them that
I think is incredibly important and
symbolizes some of the problems with
viral altruism and this is what I called
the short half-life of viral altruism
just like the saying a candle that burns
twice as fast only burns half as long
what I observed was that after these
campaigns went viral when they reached
their peak they died out and there were
never to be heard from again
they dissipated and I think this says
something incredibly important about the
changing nature of human social
interaction and the way we think about
helping others and social causes that we
need to grapple with in more detail and
I’ll show you some evidence some data
they extracted from the campaign to try
to analyze its impact I looked at
various things like Google searches
Wikipedia heads donations and I want to
share that trend with you so the first
thing I looked at was the amount of
Google searches for things like what is
als do people get curious about the
campaign during the ice bucket challenge
I wanted well what happened before what
happened during and what happened after
and you see here that during the
campaign Google searches peaked they
exploded and then when the campaign
ended so that the pattern it completely
dissipated even when the campaign was
relaunched in 2015 you see the same for
Wikipedia hits so usually about 2 3,000
people visit the ALS Wikipedia page
during the campaign that spiked to about
500,000 it was a massive explosive
interest but what is the consequence
what is the cost of that massive
explosive interest the cost is that it
almost completely disappeared when the
campaign ended and so that the donations
I think it’s incredibly important that
this caused raised 100 million dollars
to fund important ALS research but
donations went back to their original
levels the year after the anti genocide
campaign very similar things happen most
people signed up very quickly in the
first few months and then people who
were recruited in to come into the
campaign never signed up anyone else
with the organ donor initiative most of
the registrations came in the first few
weeks and then it died off slowly so I
started wondering am I the only one
who’s observing these trends and perhaps
the importance of what that is saying
about how we’re changing the way they
were engaging with others and people in
other parts of the world and important
social causes and then I came across
this interesting publication that looked
at the Syrian refugee crisis and in fact
this is the Syrian death toll for
civilians in 2015 and peaked about
250,000 and these researchers found the
exact same thing here is Google searches
for the Syrian refugee crisis what it
means what’s happening in the world and
you see that peak
right around the same cycle and then it
fades from our memories if the suffering
of other people can fade so quickly from
our busy lives what does that say about
the way that we interact with each other
so my key question has been how can we
make it stick how can we make viral
altruism stick in the long term and it’s
an incredibly important and difficult
question part of the answer is that
perhaps we shouldn’t frame really
important causes as a challenge as a
short-term initiative
maybe that very act undermines what we
want from people in terms of long term
cooperation and engagement if you think
about long term social change positive
social change that affects everyone we
all need to contribute and we need to do
so in sustained ways but of course we
can’t contribute to everything
everyone’s busy we’re overloaded if we
would take in the suffering of everyone
we would be very very overwhelmed and so
how do we engage with this paradox my
reality isn’t bad in itself but we have
to recognize that when something goes
viral when you build social momentum
when you get everyone on the bandwagon
when there’s a signal that cuts through
the noise and more people join which is
social proof in itself that then
enhances the signal that social momentum
will peak and what comes up must
eventually go down so either we have to
recognize that that is a trend that we
want or at some point we have to
transition and transform that initial
Vie reality into something more
meaningful into something more sustained
and engage in fact together with the
social metrics company we looked at
YouTube videos of the ice bucket
challenge and see what people were doing
and we were coding different elements of
the videos and what we found was that
many people didn’t even mention ALS in
the video most people don’t understand
that the entire purpose of throwing a
bucket of ice water over your head is to
freeze up your muscles to get an
experience of of the disease but what we
did found was those individuals who
actually mentioned ALS were 5 times more
likely to donate so a simple sentence
connecting the cause with the campaign
when people are able to identify and
define part of who they are as Paul
of a larger social movement that can
provide a more self-determined intrinsic
incentive to care about something in the
long term now I know everyone’s probably
familiar with the moral fable of the
hare and a turtle right the turtle
challenges the rabbit to a race and the
rabbit laughs and says sure let’s let’s
do it and of course as you would expect
the rabbit is fast and furious and he
bypasses the turtle very quickly
well then because he is fast and furious
and because he is so intense and
explosive he gets very hot and tired and
he decides to take a nap and he figured
even if the turtle surpasses me I’ll
still be faster and make it to the
finish line
of course he overslept in a turtle was
waiting for him at the finish line but
perhaps the key message here isn’t
necessarily competition perhaps the key
message here is cooperation there turtle
is a beautiful animal in itself it has
unique characteristics yes it’s slow but
it does important things and we can
appreciate it for that same for the
rabbit it’s fast and it can achieve
different things sometimes we need fast
altruism perhaps there’s a purpose of
that and so to me smart altruism what I
mean by smart is that it’s both fast and
slow and there’s different purposes for
fast and slow altruism sometimes fast
altruism means that we need to act now
maybe a natural disaster happens we need
immediate relief and that’s where fast
altruism can be useful it can be won off
that’s okay
other things are climate change public
health serious things that determine the
future of our planet that’s where we
need people to cooperate in the long
term and you already saw here that I
like to change the ending of this famous
moral fable this is a picture of a baby
rabbit and a turtle working together and
I think instead of competing this is the
real message that in order to move
forward especially in times when faith
and one another is wavering I think we
need to remind ourselves that in most
situations were better off together and
that we need to pull each other over the
finish line thank you
you [Applause]
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