ABSTRACT
T he decision to donate one’s money and time is a particularly interest-ing kind of choice because it involves trade-offs between personal, self-interested goals (i.e., goals that primarily benefit the decision maker) on the one hand, and collective, altruistic goals (i.e., goals that contribute to the greater good) on the other. Why and how people make altruistic choices has been a topic of great interest in many fields, including philosophy, biology, economics, sociology, political science, and psychology. As a result, plenty of intellectual energy has gone into devising models and theories that can explain altruistic behaviors or provide normative standards for how we should make decisions when faced with trade-offs between personal well-being and collective welfare. In this chapter, I start by considering two normative standards for making donation choices, which I call Pareto hedonism and Pareto utilitarianism. Next, I briefly review literature that suggests that people may not always be motivated to follow these standards, instead preferring means of charitable giving that involve significant pain and effort-a phenomenon called the martyrdom effect. I then discuss recent research showing that, as a result of the martyrdom effect, donation decisions often violate both Pareto hedonism and Pareto utilitarianism. I conclude by discussing the implications and dilemmas that result from this preference for challenging forms of altruism.
