Why are we so suspicious of do-gooders?

If you are a person of a certain age, you may remember an episode of Friends in which aspiring actor Joey Tribbiani (played by Matt LeBlanc) gets the chance to host a charity telethon on PBS. “A little good deed for PBS plus some TV exposure, now that’s the kind of math Joey likes to do!” he exclaims.

Phoebe Buffay (played by Lisa Kudrow) is less than impressed. “This is not a good deed, you just want to get on TV! This is completely selfish.” In the ensuing argument, Joey argues that all altruistic acts are ultimately selfish, while Phoebe tries to find an example of pure altruism that will prove him wrong.

I was reminded of their exchange while reading a recent article about the “gooder exception,” our knee-jerk revulsion at the selfless acts of others. Like Phoebe, we tend to look for someone’s ulterior motives and—once found—may treat them worse than people who acted out of obvious self-interest.

Consider the classic experiment known as the commons game, where people are each given a small sum of money that they can choose to put into a pool with the other participants. In much the same way that our bank accounts accrue interest, each of these donations will grow in value at the end of the game, when the pot is evenly distributed and distributed to each player.

One way to maximize everyone’s income is for each person to put as much money as they can into the common pool. But this is risky: selfish actors can share very little, keep their own account relatively full, and then take a bite out of everyone else’s contributions.

You can expect people to treat these free riders with contempt. In reality, the most generous contributors are often criticized just as harshly by the other players, who end up resenting them for their trust. “When asked to explain this resentment, people said things like, ‘Nobody else does what (the big contributor) does. He makes us all look bad,” University College London psychologist Nichola Raihani notes in her book The social instinct.

In some experiments, Raihani notes, players are given the chance to pay out some of their own money to punish the good guy—and many will take that opportunity. Some even want to kick them out of the game altogether. She argues that we are all playing a “status game” – and therefore we are highly suspicious of anyone who can fake virtue to increase their own status in a group.

Of course, sometimes our suspicions turn out to be correct: people often have ulterior motives. For example, imagine that your friend Andy volunteers at a homeless shelter. He seems to be driven by his concern for the vulnerable, but you later discover that he secretly has a crush on the organization’s leader, Kim. He’s just giving up his time so he can potentially go on a date with her – and in the end, he succeeds.

If that behavior ticks you off, you’re not the only one. Still, we tend not to be too critical of people’s ulterior motives for non-charitable activities. Studies suggest that we have a poorer view of Andy than someone who had taken a shift at a coffee shop to get close to the manager, for example. This is not logical: in both cases people hide their true motives. Their “crime” is essentially the same, but we are ironically much more judgmental of the person who benefits the needy through a more stereotypically charitable act – a phenomenon known as the tainted altruism effect.

That’s the subject of the new article that caught my eye by Sebastian Hafenbrädl at the University of Navarra in Spain. He suspected that this effect stems from an unconscious calculation that weighs the social rewards people receive for their apparently good deed against the size of the deed itself and how much it has cost them personally. “What troubles prosocial actors is not just the presence of self-interest, but the perception that actors are trying to reap social rewards without deserving them (i.e. without paying the price), which makes them seem deceptive,” Hafenbrädl hypothesized – and then put this to the test in a series of studies.

In the first experiment, he asked a few hundred online participants to rate the situation of a guy named Andy, who was either volunteering at a homeless shelter or a coffee shop, before rating how moral and deceptive he had been. As expected, Andy’s actions were judged far more harshly when he volunteered to help the needy, instead of working as a barista. This difference disappeared in two more conditions, when Andy confessed his ulterior motives to Kim herself. Participants no longer judged him as harshly because he had eliminated the unearned social reward of appearing altruistic.

To make sure that this was not a fluke, Hafenbrädl tested the idea in a number of other contexts. He asked participants to consider Tom, for example, the owner of a resort in the Maldives who spends $100,000 to clean up the local beaches. It sounds like environmental responsibility, but Tom is primarily concerned with the benefits for his business. In one scenario, contestants are told that he is using this supposedly charitable act to advertise the resort. In another, he does not mention the deed beyond a small circle of friends.

As in the case of the first experiment, people considered Tom to be less moral when he uses the good deed to greenwash his (and the business’s) reputation, rather than keeping it on the lower edge.

Of course, some people may be motivated by a desire to feel good about themselves. This mood boost is ultimately selfish, but Hafenbrädl’s work suggests that it is not judged nearly as harshly as consciously reaping the so-called social rewards that come from acts of kindness. He found that people who had donated blood or given to charity for their own sense of self-satisfaction were considered more moral than those who were trying to boost their reputation – although they still didn’t fare as well as the people who declared absolutely no ulterior motives.

Such results would have resonated with Phoebe. At the end of Friends episode, she ends up donating to Joey’s telethon, despite a personal dislike for PBS—an act that helps Joey gain more television exposure. She thinks she’s proven her point, until she recognizes the joy his happiness brings her.

Maybe Joey is right: there is no such thing as pure altruism. Personally, I am very happy to forgive someone for the warm glow that comes from helping others, if it means there is a little more kindness in the world. There are certainly far worse ways to get high.

David Robson’s latest book is The Laws of Connection: 13 Social Strategies That Will Change Your Life. If you have a question you’d like answered in his column, please send him a message at www.davidrobson.me/contact