'#Sharing with minimal #regulation? Evidence from neighborhood book exchange' by Anouk Schippers and Adriaan Soetevent is April's #OpenAccess publication in the spotlight.
Their study shows that peer-to-peer book exchanges, like little free #libraries, experience minimal free riding due to strong #SocialNorms among users, with a return rate of 9 #books for every 10 taken.
“In many ways, I actually think the real idea of #OpenSource is for it to allow everybody to be ‘selfish,’ not about trying to get everybody to contribute to some common good.
“In other words, I do not see open source as some big goody-goody ‘let's all sing kumbaya around the campfire and make the world a better place.’ No, open source only really works if everybody is contributing for their own #selfish reasons.”
If you believe that service to others is the ultimate good but choose selfishness because it works better, i.e., #pragmatism, then your #ethics are at war with reality. And you don’t even get the benefit of feeling good about yourself because that’s #selfish.
Embrace altruism today. Focusing on helping others without expecting anything in return enriches the soul, creates positive vibes, and strengthens community bonds.
The idea of human beings as rational utility-maximizing particles with insatiable hedonic desires is very much the product of an ideological project to justify capitalism as “natural” and has virtually no relationship to how actual human beings live but a lot of people have genuinely internalized it.
Trying to derive “human nature” by observing people under capitalist modernity is like looking at a bored, depressed wolf obsessively pacing a circle in a tiny zoo enclosure and concluding that this is “wolf nature.”
“Do not hide behind such [altruistic] superficialities as whether you should or should not give a dime to a beggar. That is not the issue. The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving him that dime.”
—#AynRand, from “Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World”
I've always felt guilty by taking for granted the rare breed of virtuous humans that provide free excellent software without relying on advertising. Let's change that and pay, how much would I “lose” anyway?
#effectivealtruism is the believe that doing harm now, in the quest for improving things that will cause greater good later evens itself out. Its not new #Stalin believed that if he ran the workers into the ground in a few decades they have a fully automated utopia that Marx had talked about as the outcome of industrialization, and that included sending nearly 3% of the nation to the gulags. Its not #altruism, it doesn't save futre lives in the long term it just creates a cycle of trauma that ensures no one is mentally healthy and that's assuming the effective altruists actually does anything to save future lives.
"We're increasingly believing that young people are incompetent and can't be trusted to do things responsibly, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because we don't allow them those opportunities, they don’t develop those opportunities." ~ Peter Gray, a research professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College.
"New research unveiled that when faced with a choice, 40% of individuals opt to remain ignorant about how their decisions impact others, often leveraging this unawareness to act more selfishly.
The researchers equate this behavior to consumers who turn a blind eye to the problematic origins of products they purchase."
Vu, L. et al. (2023). Ignorance by choice: A meta-analytic review of the underlying motives of willful ignorance and its consequences. Psychological Bulletin, 149(9-10), 611–635. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000398
"Meta-analytic results reveal that 40% of participants avoid easily obtainable information about the consequences of their actions on others, leading to a 15.6-percentage point decrease in altruistic behavior compared to when information is provided. "
Hi! 👋 While I've been on Mastodon for a few months, I'm new to sciences.social, so this is an #Introduction.
I study #nonprofit organizations and charitable #giving and how they are affected by public policy. I am interested in understanding giving as a form of #altruism that can be affected by things like #tax treatment of charitable gifts, #inequality, and the behaviors of the receiving charities and other #institutions.
All these people on my bus sniffling and sneezing, none of them masked. All just suffering hayfever, like me? I'll have you know I can't tell the difference between that and the common cold: I might be contagious without knowing it. We should normalize masking if you're sneezing: be good to others around you. #altruism#publichealth
OC What if I paid for all my free software? (www.cynicusrex.com)
I've always felt guilty by taking for granted the rare breed of virtuous humans that provide free excellent software without relying on advertising. Let's change that and pay, how much would I “lose” anyway?