午夜福利1000集合

BUDDING politicians take note. If you want to get ahead, give some cash to a good cause and make sure everyone knows about it. The advice comes from a German biologist who watched the behaviour of students donating money to each other and to charity.

Manfred Milinski of the Max Planck Institute of Limnology in Pl枚n wanted to discover the roots of what makes us philanthropic. To find out, he set up a game in which seven students each started with 35 Deutschmarks (about 拢10) and had to donate money to other students with the aim of ending up richest. They could also choose in each round to donate to UNICEF.

Each game involved 16 rounds of donating, and at the end of the round the players were asked to vote for a player to act as their representative on the student council. The game was repeated 12 times with different players. All the players could see how the other players donated. The rules prevented direct reciprocation to a donation, so generous players could gain only indirectly.

Perhaps surprisingly, those most generous to UNICEF did not reap financial rewards from their fellow players. They cleaned up in the vote, though. 鈥淭his suggests that there is a broader social gain to charity,鈥� says Milinski. He concludes that for a politician, donations to charity might be more effective than giving money to supporters. 鈥淚t says people should trust you and maybe in the future you could gain from being trusted,鈥� he says.

But the result does not agree with what people say motivates them to give, says Catherine Walker at the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF), which acts as a clearing house for individual donations to British charities. In a recent survey for CAF, people cited a 鈥渨arm glow from giving鈥� as their main motive, which would presumably apply whether others knew or not. But she suspects people might not admit to selfish motives.

For corporate donations to charity, however, giving is all about reputation. Walker says big company donations are invariably publicised. 鈥淏ut as long as the money鈥檚 been given, does it matter?鈥� she adds.

There are many selfish reasons for charitable donations. In 19th-century Britain, philanthropy was the route to political success, says Iain Mclean, a political economist at Oxford University. 鈥淵ou were expected to give to all the hospitals and football clubs in your constituency.鈥� These days, politicians contribute to charity in more subtle ways, by acting as patrons or directors.

Justin Fisher, an expert in political donations at Brunel University, adds that people or companies might donate money to political parties to benefit from a link with a certain set of political values, or to be associated with the winners.

But Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich, an expert in human altruism, says that self-interest may not be the only motivation. In experiments in which donations were secret he found that people still continued to give, which is difficult to explain in selfish terms.