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Comment by rg111 | Hacker News Reader

While not a substitution for scientific study, I always knew this.

When people are comfortable themselves, they tend to be more kind, understanding, and altruistic.

I also suspect that this is also a long-term phenomena as opposed to the short-term implications featured in this study.

When growing up, I have seen those people become altruistic, helpful, and have more bandwidth for other people’s mistakes first who started earning comfortably first.

My theory is this- being socio-economically comfortable with peace in mind makes you more tolerant, altruistic, and kind overall.

Thus study mentions only "empathetic" people. But I think this goes beyond them.

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This is why ending poverty should be the number 1 priority of our society. It puts *everyone* in a better situation to collectively solve other problems.

I'm inclined to agree. Are you aware of the Poor People's Campaign? https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/

My sense is that it'll take action on the part of people who aren't activists to really shake things up, but the PPC seems like a start.

This is an issue I care deeply about, thanks for the link. I just donated.

Having said that...from their homepage: "The poo is immoral"

https://i.imgur.com/4Cay0Zw.png

It should be the number 1 priority, but at the same there have been multiple studies that show poor people are more likely to be altruistic than rich people.

Which is why the goal isn't to make everyone rich. It's to end poverty. Those aren't the same thing, exactly. Think like, Star Trek. They have ended poverty, but it's not by making everyone wealthy.

We had an interesting experience with this recently.

A butcher accidentally added an extra zero and charged us $640 instead of $64 for our purchase. We realized a few days later when I noticed our credit card spend looks strangely high for the month.

We're regulars so the next time we were there we said "Hey it looks like you overcharged us last week. Can you fix it? We got x,y,z and it doesn't sound like that adds up to $640??"

The butcher people were super apologetic, reviewed their numbers, and refunded us. They specifically said "Wow you're so nice about this! Most people would be shouting and screaming and going crazy"

We're fortunate enough that a hiccup like that isn't a big deal. Plenty of credit card balance to buffer the hiccup and if worst comes to worst, we can issue a chargeback. And if even that doesn't work, eh we'll be unhappy but fine.

I would have just chargebacked immediately when reviewing the card statement

Like an ongoing gameshow of Jeopardy: bzzt wrong price

And then maybe contacted them to do it again

But I definitely wouldn't have been confrontational either, I’m surprised people would bother being aggressive about it, maybe if they used a debit card or were broke/illiquid

You familiar with how shitty card companies make that for vendors when you charge back?

Not everyone would want to do that to their weekly butcher shop.

I don't think the butcher shop would agree to be their weekly butcher shop anymore if they pulled that shit.

I wouldn't. Granted, Steam or Amazon pulling an entire account over one chargeback, as has been reported of both, remains bullshit. But dragging a small shop into that process without even trying to fix the problem with a friendly conversation? That's a customer I'm probably happy to fire.

I’m familiar, so dont fuck up

The American way, god forbid you ever make a mistake.

>I’m familiar, so dont fuck up

Don't.

Quite possibly the only time I've seen on HN where correcting someone's grammar is actually making a salient point in the discussion. Well done.

I assume all software you've ever written has been bug free?

Good luck charging back a card-present transaction after a week.

I have successfully charged back a card-present transaction after multiple months with US Bank.

Was it a chargeback (i.e. a fraudulent transaction) or services not rendered (i.e. faulty product etc.).

Services not rendered and it was based on a bait and switch with a rental company. I had to send in documentation and receipts but I got my money back in the end.

Seems a bit unnecessary. You could easily use the opportunity to build a better relationship through kindness. In an exclusively self-interest-maximizing sense, doing this yields better long-term outcomes for a short term cost of one-week float of some insignificant cash and the discomfort of asking.

You're entitled to it. It just seems irrational from a self-interest-maximizing sense, and definitely irrational to me who just feels pretty good about letting people undo a perfectly undoable error.

This doesn’t have much to do with altruism or empathy. In your case: well-to-do people get more in return from managing their reputation as upstanding folks than the they would get from throwing a fit over something that they might only need to get fixed within the month. In the case of poorer people: they might have to pay rent today with that money, so their manners might go out of the window somewhat due to stress (getting mad because of someone else’s mistake doesn’t have to do with lacking empathy or altruistic feeling).

> their manners might go out of the window somewhat due to stress

Isn’t this the whole premise of the article we’re commenting on?

See my parenthetical...

> (getting mad because of someone else’s mistake doesn’t have to do with lacking empathy or altruistic feeling)

If anything it makes me more sympathetic of those who do get angry. If being nice to people is more a product of one's privilege than one's nature, who am I to judge those who flip out when they're counting down the days to their next paycheck.

Well it’s a bit of both right? Stress makes it harder to be nice, especially existential stress. But lack of stress doesn’t automatically make you a good person. You still have to consciously decide to do the right/nice/polite thing.

There’s a lot of not-well-off people who are super nice because it’s faster than being confrontational. And there’s plenty of entitled assholes who think being well-off means they can shit on people.

Exactly.

> "But lack of stress doesn’t automatically make you a good person."

This.

Lack of stress only makes it easier to be nice, and stress makes it harder.

That does not mean that a person without stress is automatically nice, and stressed out people are always rude and unkind.

The fact that this needs to be said out loud is weird.

Stress erodes our buffer against external shocks. We can't avoid all stresses in life, nor would we want to (some acutre stress is great), but chronic stress can consume any additional slack we have to deal responsibly with adverse events.

It’s certainly a privilege to be generous, almost by definition; you have to _have_ in order to _give_, abstractly. Whether the currency is in the form of self-esteem, wealth, status, etc.

One of the most important things I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older. I just lived in my comfortable bubble growing up so of course it was easy to be “nice”. Of course I still believe we should always maintain a civil standard, but I understand now rudeness’ usually sad origins so to speak (emotional pain from abuse, life, whatever).

Though I've seen some amazing people who have very little still being generous.

And I have also seen crises wear down good people and turn them into ungenerous wrecks of themselves.

In the end, what I learned is that people are people, and I really can't judge anything by the cover. I have no idea what else is going on with someone, or their character and capacity to meet great hardships. And even if they have little capacity ... they are still people.

How well that holds up in my own moments of crises? I can do a lot better.

I wish I could up-vote this comment more than once.

Since "socio-economically comfortable" is relative (some people are socio-economically comfortable with much less than other people) I'd argue it does not go beyond the general notion of "empathetic people"

Competition kills generosity.

Competition also makes the world go round

Nope, it's gravity.

And cooperation. Humans have risen above other species because of their cooperative approach (eg. sharing knowledge by passing it through language, forming communities with broader goals to protect the entire group, etc).

This is pretty evident in all the stories of those children raised by animals in the wild: none of them develop much past their animal caretakers.

You could say the competition lies in maintaining and creating new relationships, in order to be able to cooperate well

But competition is how we get out of local maxima, disruptive improvements needs competition, they don't happen through cooperation.

For example, lets say you have a better way to make pots. You show it to people, but nobody listens, they think that their way of making pots is better. How do you actually help them get benefit from your discovery? Well, you set up a competition, so it can be clear to everyone which way is best. Then you beat the old way of making pots, they have to admit that they were wrong and now everyone benefits (except the old pot makers who now has to relearn their things and lose their status as masters).

Competition in the natural world is typically zero sum. In the human world cooperation and competition aren't mutually exclusive, and in fact we tend to build societies that leverage competition for mutual gain--i.e. cooperative competition. In any event, I think the point is that [altruistic, non-kin, systemic] cooperation is the distinguishing characteristic of the human species, not that it's the only dynamic at play or even the one that predominates across all discrete social interactions.

Very nicely put, that was exactly my point.

> Competition in the natural world is typically zero sum.

Evolution itself can be seen as a positive sum. Without it, even single-celled organisms would not exist.

Evolution, through natural selection, can be seen as driven by competion between pieces of information (genes), much more than it is competition between individuals. (all individuals die eventually, so for them the game may be zero sum).

Similarily, competition within human culture also produce positive (or in some cases negative) sum effects that need to be closely tied to individuals, but more often to memes/ideas (and sometimes, still, genes).

When Henry Ford introduced the assembly line, he did benefit personally (some of the profit was spent on introducing a minimum wage and 5 day work week), but soon, competition would force everyone to use the same idea.

Depending on your point of view, this can be seen as positive sum (increased productivity, less work) or negative (fewer and more boring jobs in manufacturing).

> competition is how we get out of local maxima

Careful. The prisoner's dilemma shows us that competition can drive the system to the globally worst outcome.

Competition and cooperation aren't polar opposites, though.

Mutually cooperating teams / tribes / nations / organizations often find themselves in competition with other mutually cooperating teams / tribes etc.

Competition is definitely a huge incentive to innovate, though it also may lead you astray.

An extreme version of competition is ... war. And right now we see the dynamic develop: dozens of NATO and NATO-adjacent countries cooperate with one another and with Ukraine so that Ukraine may "compete" on the battlefield with a stronger neighbour, Russia. Cooperation and competition by proxy.

Russia tries to counter that by building its own cooperation team, but finds almost no significant volunteers to team with, except Belarus.

> Competition is definitely a huge incentive to innovate

Citation needed.

Competition and generosity are unrelated. Many cultures in fact have competitions in which status is gained by being more generous. Perhaps the most iconic is the potlatch[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch

Generosity kills competition

Sounds like a good excuse to make a plan to get ahead first before helping anyone.

What’s my five year plan? To ruthlessly beat my opposition so that I will be in a better place to help the needy. Actually scratch that—make it a fifteen year plan.

The world is not a zero-sum game like it was 250 years ago.

I am not a company in a low-margin, huge-scale business. I am a person. A human being. I do not need to "ruthlessly beat my opposition" to be happy and comfortable.

And a person is not a 2-tensor with two digits- altruism and success. My point is- when you are comfortable, content- no matter whether you earn money or not, or how much you earn, you tend to be more altruistic.

I concede that you must be a very altruistic and empathetic person.

This is how relative poverty is born. One man doing the work of ten, leaving nine with nothing to do but depend on the first.

If the first were to stop working once he has enough for himself, the other nine would be allowed to work for themselves.

Sounds like what Mao did in China 70 years ago lol

An interesting corollary of this is that comfortable and wealthy people are going to be nicer to you than poor people.

Isn’t this just to say, when your belly is full, and you see people suffering hunger, you don’t feel yourself threatened. If you have surplus, you can be generous of heart, spirit, and material, because your mind is not clouded by the emotions of your own suffering.

Seems like this could be a feedback cycle too. Be less kind to people and they'll treat you badly in return.

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