The horrors in Haiti got me thinking about the psychology of charity. On its face, the act of charitable giving is quite simple and intuitively appealing. Someone is in dire need, you sense their pain, and you land a hand. This helpful impulse is in fact a part of the unique hardware of the human species. We are highly autonomous and creative as individuals, but we can only survive in highly organized groups. We have therefore developed the ability, missing in other primates, to respond to subtle cues in others not only instrumentally, but emotionally. We feel empathy in a way unheard of in the animal kingdom. We are able to feel empathy—to literally experience someone else’s feelings as our own--not only toward our own immediate relatives, but toward any member of the species, and, for that matter, toward members of other species. If you see a wounded dog in the street you actually feel the dog’s pain and terror.

Our ability to empathize is the social glue that helps us maintain the complex cooperative structures required to sustain the species. The recent discovery of a system of “mirror neurons” provides the physiological explanation for this capacity. Mirror neurons fire both when we perform a certain act and when we observe it in others. Thus, seeing someone get hurt activates the same neural structure that responds when we ourselves are hurt.  

This is why, contrary to popular opinion and the impression you get from the nightly news, the human tendency to cooperate and sooth is stronger and deeper than the tendency to compete and aggress. Competition, for one, depends on cooperation, because if you can’t cooperate to agree on the rules of the competition, there will be no competition.

Aggression is also secondary to cooperation in our species. Most of us, after all, live lives that are very exposed and vulnerable to the ill intentions of others. And most of us have the capacity to spread much harm around, if we so choose. But if you look at the capacity for harm each of us possesses in relation to the level of harmful behaviors that we actually perform every day, you will find that harm is an exception, not the rule, for human behavior around the world.

So charity is in our genes. And yet charitable action, as personal and social habit, has some dubious features. First, our charitable impulse tends to be reactive, not proactive. We are good at reacting to the disaster that has happened, not at preparing for the one yet to happen. How many of those shelling out money now would have contributed similarly to an effort to bring Haiti’s buildings up to code some years before the quake? We know rationally that prevention is more useful and effective than treatment (and hence more charitable), but anticipatory prevention efforts do not usually provoke the emotional response that underlies much charitable giving. We are less likely to donate money to vaccinate a healthy baby than we are to donate money to save an already sick one, even though the former strategy is much more effective, and hence more humane.

We also tend to respond with charity to the presentation of need, rather than to actual need. Right now and every day around the world there are people in desperate need, hungry and wounded and dying just like those in Haiti. But their plight is defuse and silent, spread out over continents and over time. It is, in other words, boring, not exciting. And boredom does not elicit charitable giving.

One may argue that, morally, if the life of a poor Haitian family is really as worthy as the life of a family in the U.S., then that life should not depend on whether someone in the US woke up in a charitable mood; should not depend on a YouTube video; should not depend on whether that family’s suffering has been successfully bundled into the sufficiently compelling narrative of the latest spectacular disaster. And yet our approach to charity often assures that this remains the case. We want to keep the power to dole out charity when and if we wish. That is understandable, but it has little to do with effectively protecting and saving people. It has everything to do with making ourselves feel good in a selfish, and intellectually lazy, manner while at the same time avoiding the real work—the change of consciousness, the systemic political change, and the real prolonged sacrifices—that would actually facilitate better lives for weak populations around the world.

Instead of congratulating ourselves yet again on our humanity and kindness as we tweet $10 for the poor Haitians, we should ask real questions about our process of compassion, and whether better ways exist to harness it for real, sustained, demonstrable good. Instead of repeatedly throwing lifelines into the riptide to save the drowning, we may want to figure out why so many repeatedly enter the treacherous waters in the first place.