Generosity isn’t entirely about money, but it does include money. Money, money, money. If you are unusually self-aware, you might have noticed a very slight feeling of tightening or closing at just the mention of the word. If you're that self-aware and spiritually evolved, you may have allowed that reaction to pass on as quickly as it arose. If you didn’t notice it, that doesn’t mean it’s not in there pulling the strings your reactivity unconsciously.
Research suggests that simply having the idea of money planted in mind has a tendency sometimes to reduce inclinations toward generosity. So I’m taking a risk by just saying the word money. I’m hoping that knowing about human psychology around money will allow us to consciously override the usual reactivity.
The average income per person worldwide is less than $10,000 a year. Perhaps your income is a little above the world average. Our very wealth itself can make us less generous, if we let it – if we don’t intentionally counter-act the effects of wealth through the practice of generosity.
In one study, experimenters enlisted undergraduates to play monopoly, two players at a time, but with different rules. One randomly selected player started the game with $2,000 of monopoly money, got $200 for passing Go each time, and threw two dice for every move – which, you may recall, is the normal way monopoly is played. Let’s call this player Bob. The other player, let’s call him Bill, started with $1,000, got $100 for passing Go each time, and threw one die for every move. “The students play for 15 minutes under the watchful eye of two video cameras, while down the hall researchers huddle around a computer screen, later recording the subjects’ every facial twitch and hand gesture.” What happens? Initially Bob "reacted to the inequality between him and his opponent with a series of smirks, an acknowledgment, perhaps of the inherent awkwardness of the situation. 'Hey,' his expression seemed to say, 'This is weird and unfair, but whatever.' Soon, though, as he whizzes around the board, purchasing properties and collecting rent, whatever discomfort he feels seems to dissipate.... He balloons in size, spreading his limbs toward the far ends of the table. He smacks his playing piece as makes the circuit – smack, smack, smack – ending his turns with a board-shuddering bang!...As the game nears its finish, [Bob] moves his [piece] faster....He’s all efficiency. He refuses to meet [Bill’s] gaze. His expression is stone cold as he takes the loser’s cash."
Privilege can function to shut down compassion – if we don’t consciously decide not to let it. Another study “showed through quizzes, online games, questionnaires, in-lab manipulations, and field studies that living high on the socioeconomic ladder can, colloquially speaking, dehumanize people. It can make them less ethical, more selfish, more insular, and less compassionate than other people.” In one experiment, wealthier people were more likely to take candy from a bowl of sweets designated for children. If there is such a thing as entitlement culture, it is more often the wealthy who feel most entitled. As psychologist Paul Piff concludes, “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything, the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, [jerks]....People higher up on the socioeconomic ladder are about three times more likely to cheat than people on the lower rungs.”
The extent to which people with money behave as if the world revolves around them was further illustrated in another study. Paul Piff and this research team “spent three months hanging out at...a gritty, busy corner with a four-way stop....[They] would stake out the intersection at rush hour, crouching behind a bank of shrubs… and catalog the cars that came by, giving each vehicle a grade from one to five. (A new-model Mercedes would be five; an old, battered Honda would be one.) Then the researchers would observe drivers’ behavior. A third of people who drove grade-five cars, Piff found, rolled into the intersection without first coming to a compete stop....‘Upper-class drivers were the most likely to cut off other vehicles even when controlling for time of day, driver’s sex [as it appeared to be to the observers], and amount of traffic.’"
A similar experiment tested "drivers’ regard for pedestrians....A researcher would enter a zebra crossing as a car approached it. The results were more staggering....Fully half the grade-five cars cruised right into the crosswalk. ‘It’s like they didn’t even see them,' [said Piff]."
Timothy Judge (Notre Dame), Beth Livingston (Cornell), and Charlice Hurst (U of W. Ontario) published a study, "Do Nice Guys -- and Gals -- Really Finish Last?" “Subjects were asked to assess whether they had a forgiving nature or found fault with others, whether they were trusting, cold, considerate, or cooperative. Then they were given an agreeableness score. Men with the lowest agreeableness earned $42,113 in a given year; those with the highest agreeableness earned $31,259."
In another study researcher Kathleen Vohs merely planted the idea of money in subjects' minds. As the subjects filled out questionnaires, some of them were in a room with Monopoly money present (left over from a prior monopoly game), and some were not. "Vohs got her result only after the ¬subject believed the session was over. Heading for the door, he would bump into a person whose arms were piled ¬precariously high with books and office supplies. That person (who worked for Vohs) would drop 27 little yellow pencils, like those you get at a golf course. Every subject in the study bent down to pick up the mess. But the money-primed subjects picked up 15 percent fewer pencils than the control group." (Miller) That’s just from the thought of money planted by having Monopoly money nearby.
Vohs stressed that money-priming did not make her subjects malicious — just uninterested. She said: 'I don’t think they mean any harm, but picking up pencils just isn’t their problem.'
Over and over, Vohs has found that money can make people anti-social – less pro-social. She primes subjects by seating them near a screen-saver showing currency floating like fish in a tank or asking them to descramble sentences, some of which include words like bill, check, or cash. Then she tests their sensitivity to other people. In her Science article, Vohs showed that money-primed subjects gave less time to a colleague in need of assistance and less money to a hypothetical charity. When asked to pull up a chair so a stranger might join a meeting, money-primed subjects placed the chair at a greater distance from themselves than those in a control group. When asked how they’d prefer to spend their leisure time, money-primed people chose a personal cooking lesson over a catered group dinner. Given a choice between working collaboratively or alone, they opted to go solo.” (Miller)
In some ways, on some measures, there may be a plus side. Thinking about money makes people more oriented to efficiency and productivity – like Bob, the advantaged monopoly player who became all efficiency. Money-focus encourages thoughts of self-sufficiency: less willing to help, but also less interested in being helped. Research so far hazards no guess as to where the tipping point is after which personality transformation kicks in – and that point is surely highly variable from individual to individual.
There is a basic human tendency to protect what we have, and the more we have, the stronger the tendency to put our energy into the having. It requires intentionality to avoid being sucked into that pattern. So we come to the spiritual practice of generosity. Deliberate generosity counter-acts that self orientation. Warm-heartedness also reduces blood pressure, anxiety and stress and improves health.
You’ve got however much money you’ve got. How much of it can you give away and still meet your material needs? Give it away. We can make it into something that connects us to others, that connects us to the world’s suffering. Otherwise, it will be a force of disconnection, tending to makes us less social, less caring. Give it away as a regular practice – weekly if possible.
You will never meet a generous person who was bitter or a bitter person who is generous. That bears remembering. Generosity and bitterness are incompatible. It’s not entirely clear whether generosity causes reduction in bitterness, or reduction in bitterness causes generosity – just as it isn’t always clear whether wealth causes disagreeableness or disagreeableness facilitates wealth acquisition. Either way, they go together.
Generosity – also known as hospitality, kindnesss, largesse, benevolence, bounteousness, magnanimity, openhandedness, warmheartedness, compassion – life as overflow – enriches our lives. When we live from an awareness of abundance rather than in the grip of the delusion of scarcity, generosity becomes possible. And generosity grows through practice.
To develop in an area requires disciplined commitment. The skilled athletes are not the ones who exercise when they happen to be in the mood for it. The skilled poets or musicians do not just write poetry or rehearse when they feel like it. They show up for daily practice, whether they feel like it or not. Generosity develops in us through a disciplined commitment to develop it as a way of being.
The baseball catcher and later manager and coach, Yogi Berra, once said, “You can’t think and hit at the same time.” He meant that we have to show up for the discipline of training our habit muscles, so that the habit muscles can be our guide when, as in most of what we do in the days of our lives, there isn’t the time or the inclination to think them through very much. For hitting, as for many actions, we must rely on habits, so the formation of the habits we'll need is crucial. For that matter, even when there is time for reflection, the way we think is governed by the feelings and values formed as habit.
Consider the story I’ve heard of a woman getting off a subway train. As she readies for climbing the steps into the cold outside air, she reaches into the pockets of her coat for her gloves. She finds only one glove. The other must have fallen out of her pocket. She turns around and looks back into the subway car, and she can see the seat where she had been sitting, and, sure enough, there’s her other glove on the seat. But now the doors are closing. She won’t have time to get back in and retrieve her glove. So she takes the glove she has, and throws into the subway onto the seat next to its mate – just as the doors close.
I love that story. One glove isn’t going to do her much good, but now somebody else can have the complete pair. That’s the reflex of a person who has cultivated generosity as a deep habit of being, a habit of the heart. It’s the reasonable thing to do, but if you rely on reason, the train will be long gone before you’ve worked it out. Random acts of kindness and senseless beauty flourish as the fruits of disciplined habit-formation that is not at all random or senseless.
I picked up this story from my colleague Rev. Terry Sweetser. Rev. Sweetser remarked:
"You know she must have lived a long life of generosity, a life of wild and creative generosity of spirit, to be able to think so quickly, to act so urgently and healthily, to know precisely in that moment what would bless the world right then and there. It happened in an instant, but that was planned giving through and through. Something in her past, or everything in her past, prepared her for her gesture -- habits of living and giving practiced and refined her whole life long."As a piece of the happy discipline of generous giving, the piece that has to do with giving away our money, it will help to think in terms of percents. This gift comes from you. It is you, so place it in the context of your overall income. Are you giving away twenty percent? Ten percent? Five percent? I ask you to decide the percent first – what percent are you going to give away? Maybe this year it can be a higher percent than last year. After you’ve decided the percent, do the math and figure out what dollar amount that comes to. Don’t start by thinking about a dollar amount. Start by thinking about a percent.
Percent of what? The general guidelines would be AGI – adjusted gross income. Certain vital expenses are subtracted, but itemized or standard deductions are not. Adjusted Gross Income is the benchmark used by researchers into giving rates. And what percent of your AGI do you choose to give?
The traditional “tithe” for the church is 10 percent. The Torah, the central part of the Hebrew Bible, also known as the first five books of the Old Testament (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), set forth law requiring that a tenth of all produce, flocks, and cattle be given to support the Levites, the priestly class in ancient Israel. The Torah also emphasized assistance to foreigners, orphans and widows, those in need, in addition to the tithe of support for the priestly class. The Christian Testament mentions no specific rules about tithing. Jesus is simply clear that we are obligated to be cheerfully generous to those in need.
The tithing rules in the Torah were based on the religious and social system of ancient Israel and on an agricultural economy. The Torah is not authoritative for us. Even it were, it does not address modern-day questions about what percentage we should give, how much to the church and how much to other charities. Still, I do find there’s something psychologically significant about 10 percent – just move the decimal over one place, and that’s what you give away. If you’re just starting out with generosity practice, giving away 10 percent is a good start. Those who have been at it longer, or are better established in life, can think about higher percentages.
Giving is a crucial part of your spiritual life, a necessary component of your spiritual growth, and growing ethically and spirituality is the mission of this congregation. It is our business – it is our mission -- collectively to encourage compassion in each other. It's really good for us to do this.
"Research from the University of British Columbia and Harvard Business School shows that spending money on someone else — as little as $5 a day — can significantly boost your happiness. Students who practiced random acts of kindness were significantly happier than those who were not given this task. In another study, college students were given money and directed to either spend it on themselves or spend it pro-socially (on activities meant to benefit other people). Participants who spent it pro-socially were happier at the end of the day than those who spent it on themselves." (Mark Ewert, The Generosity Path, 2)Part of your giving goes to charities. Charitable giving is an important spiritual practice. For this part, I encourage looking at website called givewell.org. They’ve put thousands of hours into researching which charities are most effective, dollar for dollar, and are underfunded. They search for the charities that save or improve lives the most per dollar. Right now, their charities include the Malaria Consortium, which dispenses malaria prevention medicine. The Against Malaria Foundation, which provides mosquito nets to reduce risk of exposure to malaria. Helen Keller International which provides supplements to counteract vitamin A deficiency in children under 5. And New Incentives, and organization that provides cash incentives for routine childhood vaccines. Those are some good charities to receive a portion of the percentage that you set aside for giving away. They are listed at givewell.org.
Other websites you might take a look at:
Giving What We Can http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/
80,000 Hours http://80000hours.org/
The Life You Can Save http://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/
Effective Animal Activism http://www.effectiveanimalactivism.org/
Peter Singer mentions these websites in his TED talk where he makes the point that helping others is a requirement of an ethical life. Singer addresses the questions: How much of a difference can I make? Am I expected to abandon my career? Isn't charity bureaucratic and ineffective anyway? Isn't it a burden to give up so much?
Once you’ve decided the total percentage you’re going to give away – for the sake of the wellbeing of others, and for the sake of your own spiritual wellbeing – then there’s the question of how much of that goes to support your congregation and its programs. If you determine a percent first, then calculate what dollar amount that comes to, your pledge amount will probably not be a nice round number. But you’ll know it’s a nice round percent.
For your congregation's thriving, and for your thriving as a part of it, I suggest thinking in the range of three to five percent of adjusted gross income. Again, the more well-established you are in life, the higher the percentage can be. If you’re a young couple just starting out, two percent is a level of generosity you can feel really good about.
Pledging is a part of the meaning of membership, a part of what makes membership meaningful, and part of your spiritual practice and development. Through the practice of generosity, we are connected, made whole, better able to be the people we want to be.
May it be so. Amen.
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