Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [53]
The trade-floor cheating made List wonder if perhaps all the “trust” and “fairness” he’d witnessed in the back room weren’t trust and fairness at all. What if they were just a product of the experimenter’s scrutiny? And what if the same was true for altruism?
Despite all the lab evidence of altruism collected by his peers and elders, List was skeptical. His own field experiments pointed in a different direction, as did his personal experience. Back when he was nineteen years old, he delivered a load of paper goods to Chicago. His girlfriend, Jennifer, came along for the ride. (They’d later marry and have five kids.) When they got to the warehouse, four men were in the loading bay, sitting on a couch. It was the dead of summer and punishingly hot. One man said they were on break.
List asked how long the break would last.
“Well, we don’t know,” the man said, “so why don’t you just start unloading yourself.”
It was customary for warehouse workers to unload a trucker’s truck, or at least help. Plainly that wasn’t going to happen.
“Well, if you guys don’t want to help, that’s fine,” List said. “Just give me the keys to the forklift.”
They laughed and told him the keys were lost.
So List, along with Jennifer, began unloading the truck, box by box. Drenched in sweat and thoroughly miserable, they labored under the mocking eyes of the four workmen. Finally only a few boxes were left. One of the workmen suddenly found the keys to the forklift and drove it over to List’s truck.
Encounters like this had made John List seriously question whether altruism truly runs wild through the veins of humankind, as Dictator and other lab experiments argued.
Yes, that research had won much acclaim, including a Nobel Prize. But the more List thought about it, the more he wondered if perhaps those findings were simply—well, wrong.
In 2005, thanks largely to his field experiments, List was offered a tenured professor position at the University of Chicago, perhaps the most storied economics program in the world. This wasn’t supposed to happen. It is a nearly inexorable law of academia that when a professor lands a tenured job, he does so at an institution less prestigious than the one where he began teaching, and also less prestigious than where he received his Ph.D. John List, meanwhile, was like a salmon who swam downstream to spawn, into the open water. Back in Wisconsin, his family was unimpressed. “They wonder why I’ve failed so miserably,” he says, “why I’m not still in Orlando, where the weather is really great, instead of Chicago, where the crime is really high.”
By now he knew the literature on altruism experiments as well as anyone. And he knew the real world a bit better. “What is puzzling,” he wrote, “is that neither I nor any of my family or friends (or their families or friends) have ever received an anonymous envelope stuffed with cash. How can this be, given that scores of students around the world have outwardly exhibited their preferences for giving in laboratory experiments by sending anonymous cash gifts to anonymous souls?”
So List set out to definitively determine if people are altruistic by nature. His weapon of choice was Dictator, the same tool that created the conventional wisdom. But List had a few modifications up his sleeve. This meant recruiting a whole bunch of student volunteers and running a few different versions of the experiment.
He began with classic Dictator. The first player (whom we’ll call Annika once again) was given some cash and had to decide whether to give none, some, or even all of it to some anonymous Zelda. List found that 70 percent of the Annikas gave some money to Zelda, and the average “donation” was about 25 percent of the total. This result