The Frontal Cortex

Panhandling is a surprisingly lucrative profession:

Anecdotal surveys by journalists and police, and even testimony by panhandlers themselves, suggest that begging can yield anywhere from $20 to $100 a day--though police in Coos Bay, Oregon, found that local panhandlers were taking in as much as $300 a day in a Wal-Mart parking lot. "A panhandler could make thirty to forty thousand dollars a year, tax-free money," Baker says. In Memphis, a local FOX News reporter, Jason Carter, donned old clothes and hit the streets earlier this year, earning about $10 an hour.

Why do people give money away to perfect strangers, especially when the strangers admit that the money is going to buy booze? Believe it or not, we're actually extraordinarily sympathetic creatures. (Such empathy is a by-product of our social intelligence.) While evolutionary psychology often stresses the amorality of natural selection - we are all Hobbesian brutes, driven to survive by selfish genes - our psychological reality is much less bleak. Consider a simple variation on the ultimatum game* known as the dictator game. Unlike the ultimatum game, in which the responder can decide whether or not to accept the monetary offer, in the dictator game, the proposer simply dictates how much the responder receives. (This is much closer to the power relationship between a pedestrian with some spare change and a panhandler.) What's surprising, though, is that people with all the power in the dictator game are still rather generous, and give away about one-third of the total amount of money. I imagine a similar effect is at work when people are panhandling. We sympathize, if only for a moment, with the plight of the beggar, and so we toss a few coins into the cup. Such charity is a public demonstration - both to ourselves and others - of both our innate empathy and our power.

*The rules of the ultimatum game are simple, if a little bit unfair: an experimenter pairs two people together, and hands one of them $10. This person (the proposer) gets to decide how the ten dollars is divided. The second person (the responder) can either accept the offer, allowing both players to pocket their respective shares, or reject the offer, in which case both players walk away empty-handed.

via marginal revolution