'Impure Altruism': Giving Has Become a Social Media Trend

Your day usually starts off the same way: You get up in the morning, you have a bite to eat (a quick bite at a fast food place is always readily available) and then you’re off to work. Today is one of those days, but a little different — today you’ve decided to do something you have considered many times but have never acted on.

This is how the narrative starts: You pull up to a fast food drive-thru on your way to work, but this time you have a US army veteran occupying the passenger seat next to you. This man has been home for three or four years, but has been homeless for nearly the same amount of time. You make an order for the two of you and get him whatever he wants; you treat him with kindness and respect. He appears to be very grateful and humble — one would be after having to endure what we can’t even imagine.

You hand him his meal and ask him where he would like to be dropped off before saying, “I’ll tell you this, okay? I go to work everyday around 4 o’clock, okay? Now, if you meet me at that gas station I’m gonna buy you lunch or dinner or whatever. I just want to do something.”

You ask him to stay positive and hopeful as he reaches out to shake your hand. “God bless you, brother” the veteran says to you before breaking down into tears. “Nobody’s showed me this much kindness in a while.” Here is a man that served overseas for your liberties and your rights only to come back home to be nothing but a shadow on the pavement. “There are a lot of us out here, bro,” he adds.

Now, there is one thing I forgot to mention. Your phone has been out this whole time with the front camera recording the whole incident, from the time he’s been sitting there waiting for his order to the time he breaks down. And that's the problem -- the seemingly selfless concern for the well-being of others has become a craze on the internet. Random “acts of kindness” and social experiment videos seem to be competing online in a case of "who can create the most moving video."

Many people are questioning whether these selfless acts have ulterior motives. In Impure Altruism and Donations To Public Goods: A Theory of Warm-Glow Giving, James Andreoni states that people's actions can be motivated by social pressure, the desire for a "warm glow" and social acclaim. In the age of Web 2.0 and the “I buy, therefore I am” generation, it is harder to prove pure altruism.

But does it matter? After all, these videos and social experiments ultimately spread awareness to certain social issues such as poverty, racial discrimination and gender inequality just to name a few. Do we scrutinize the messenger’s method of putting out the message if it is ultimately received?

Of course we do -- especially when the messenger (wrongfully) benefits a great deal from it. After all, viral videos lead to likes, shares and retweets, which lead to more views and a bigger social media profile.

The veteran in the drive-thru may have been aware that the camera was there the whole time. However, he doesn't want to say anything that would potentially ruin his chance for a proper meal. But if you were only offering him a meal with the invisible strings attached and wouldn’t have done it otherwise, then the issue becomes clear -- it's not about him, it's about you.