Years ago, somebody showed me ‘Humanitarians of Tinder’, a website collecting Tinder profiles in which white Westerners posed with poor people (mostly African children) in the Global South, presumably while volunteering.
The site’s message was obvious: these people do not really care about helping the global poor. They care about seeming to care, in ways that photograph well. So many near-identical images also invited the suspicion that they had volunteered in the first place for the photo opportunities.
This suspicion was reinforced by a broader cultural vibe shift. In the comparative innocence of pre-woke progressivism, it seemed admirable for rich white people to be seen trying to help poor non-white people. By 2014, when ‘Humanitarians of Tinder’ appeared on Tumblr, a new vision of social justice was in the ascendant, one that condemned the vanity and evils of “white saviourism”.
Search for the site today and one of the first results is ‘Humanitarians of Tinder: Constructing Whiteness and Consuming the Other’, an academic article analysing how the photos reproduce racist and colonial logic, commodifying Black children as a way of “promoting and excusing the privileged self”.
I remember a flash of anxiety when I first saw the site. Had I ever posted a cringe photo like that? Once I remembered that, no, I had never volunteered to help the global poor (phew), the anxiety gave way to delicious, guffawing laughter at these devious bastards volunteering in Africa just to flaunt their virtue and get matches.
In the years since, I have come to see the humanitarians of Tinder—and, more broadly, humanity—very differently.
On Seeming to Care and Sincerely Caring
‘Humanitarians of Tinder’ relied on a familiar move in social life: the accusation that a person or community’s professed beliefs, values, or principles mask much grubbier motives. The humanitarians of Tinder did not really care about the global poor. They cared about helping themselves.
The distinction between wanting the rewards of appearing virtuous and wanting to be virtuous is one of the oldest themes in philosophy.
In Plato’s Republic, Glaucon tells the story of a ring that makes its wearer invisible, freeing them from reputational constraints on bad behaviour. Even a good man with this ring, he argues, would act badly. His brother Adeimantus adds that societies encourage justice by pointing not to its intrinsic value but to its rewards:
Parents and tutors are always telling their sons and their wards that they are to be just; but why? not for the sake of justice, but for the sake of character and reputation; in the hope of obtaining for him who is reputed just some of those offices, marriages, and the like…
As the reference to marriage suggests, the attempt to exchange virtue for sexual benefits did not begin with Tinder.
The brothers themselves do not want to believe this cynical view. Much of the rest of the Republic is Plato’s convoluted attempt to show, through his theory of the properly ordered soul, that real virtue exists, virtue oblivious to reputational rewards.
In this way, the first great work of Western political philosophy captures attitudes that remain with us today: a fear that self-serving motives lurk behind even the noblest pursuits, and a hope that they do not explain everything.
Today, most of us reconcile these attitudes not through Plato’s strange metaphysics but through a highly selective cynicism. Yes, the humanitarians of Tinder were greedy little grandstanders, and we can all laugh at them. But we are different, and so are the people we admire. We care about capital ‘V’ virtue, the real deal. (Rousseau speculated that he would use an invisibility ring to make others happy.)
At one level, this selectivity is unavoidable. We cannot make sense of much human behaviour, let alone the felt pull of morality and principle, without acknowledging that sincere virtue exists. As Adam Smith observed, we do not just want to be praised, nice as that is; we want to be praiseworthy.
But where does this desire to be praiseworthy come from?
What if the pursuit of social, sexual, and material advantage does not just tempt us away from our values and ideals but builds them? What if the humanitarians of Tinder were neither calculating sociopaths nor benevolent angels but members of the same species that now laughs at them: competitive apes whose sincere values are shaped by status competition and the pursuit of social approval?
This perspective will be a central theme of my next book, Why It’s OK to Be Cynical, which argues that grubby motives—the pursuit of status, power, reputation, sex, social approval, and material resources—play a much bigger role in our behaviour than we want to admit. They do not just compete with our values and principles. Over time, they construct them, and then regulate how we interpret and act on them.
The Evolution of Moralish Apes
Humans are apes shaped by Darwinian selection, and much of our behaviour is unsurprising given this fact. We compete for status, pursue attractive sexual partners, favour our kin, form alliances against rivals, and hoard resources.
At the same time, we do many things that do not look very ape-like. We make sacrifices for morality and principle. We care about fairness and the welfare of strangers.
As Hume noted, there is “some particle of the dove, kneaded into our frame, along with the elements of the wolf and serpent”.
What explains the dove? An intuitive view treats our grand and grubby motives as separate parts of a complex nature, with willpower or “reason” or some other faculty arbitrating between them. The line separating good and evil, wrote Solzhenitsyn, passes right through every human heart.
Many scholars who take an evolutionary approach develop this intuition into a theory of genetically evolved moral dispositions.
The theory comes in many forms, but the core idea is that the environments in which human psychology evolved contained stable features like interdependent group life, the threat of exclusion and execution, and the need to adapt to a local culture. Over many generations, these conditions selected for friendly, fair-minded, moral beings disposed to internalise and enforce community rules. These prosocial dispositions have not wholly replaced our more self-serving, nepotistic, and competitive motives, but they are largely autonomous from them.
There is clearly some truth in these accounts. Humans are not blank slates when it comes to morality and altruism. Nevertheless, many researchers greatly overstate the innateness of our moral psychology.
The most famous evidence that pre-verbal infants have a moral sense recently failed a large preregistered replication. Toddlers certainly do help from early in life, but they grow up in homes where helping is constantly encouraged and praised. And although an aversion to inequality appears fairly early across societies, it is an aversion to getting less than others. The distaste for getting more emerges later, and only in some societies. (Human history illustrates this lesson in abundance: people are often blissfully unperturbed by unfairness that benefits them.)
Nor are we simply sponges for whatever norms our community enforces. We comply with and enforce norms strategically, and we advocate for norms that serve our interests. Moreover, disinterested third-party enforcement of norms is rare in the small-scale societies supposed to most closely resemble those ancestral environments. In one study of 444 transgressions among horticulturalists in Indonesia, Manvir Singh and Zachary Garfield found no cases of direct third-party punishment at all.
The idea that we simply evolved to be “friendly” through self-domestication owes more to wishful thinking than to serious science. There is a grain of truth here (we are socially tolerant and lack the reactive aggression of many animals), but its most optimistic formulations struggle to explain why humans invest so much effort in monitoring, incentivising, punishing, and imprisoning each other. Unlike cows or golden retrievers, people must be domesticated continually. The process is also fragile, as thousands of years of brutal violence, conflict, and exploitation suggest.
None of this should be surprising. Our ancestors lived in highly varied social worlds, with dramatic shifts in who held power, whom it paid to trust, and which behaviours were rewarded. A fixed moral psychology would often have misfired. What paid instead was the capacity to learn what works locally and adapt accordingly.
Where being friendly, fair-minded, norm-abiding, and principled pays, people develop these traits, at least to some degree, just as they develop the opposite traits where those are costly. We do not just acquire information and behaviours from our social world. We acquire the desires, values, and principles that advance our interests within it.
Learning Adaptations
This basic idea is not original. Nietzsche observed that if anybody “long and obstinately desires to appear something, he finds it difficult at last to be anything else.” Orwell, remembering how a Burmese crowd’s expectations drove him to shoot an elephant, wrote: “He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.” More recently, scholars from Pierre Bourdieu to Philip Tetlock to Manvir Singh to Will Storr have analysed the process far more systematically (see Further Reading below for a longer list).
One route is captured by the metaphor of the mask, in which pretence is slowly translated into conviction through habit and other forms of internalisation. However, most cases need not involve explicit pretence at all.
A brutally compressed model goes like this. Through genetic evolution, humans inherit powerful goals. Some are obvious: food, health, safety, sex. Others reflect the intensely social nature of our species: approval, status, inclusion. These are “primary” rewards and punishers: things we do not have to learn to want or avoid. We also have sophisticated learning mechanisms, many of them unconscious, for working out how to get these rewards and avoid these punishers locally.
Behaviours that lead to rewards are repeated and reinforced, and things consistently associated with rewards become “secondary rewards”: we learn to value them for their own sake. (Money is the classic example.) In this way, an activity we undertake to gain status can become rewarding in itself. What begins as a route to our desires becomes a desire. This learning can happen through direct experience and reasoning, but also through social learning: tracking which behaviours and traits in others are admired, desired, mocked, or ridiculed.
Consider, for example, the difference between calculating and sincere virtue. Audiences excel at identifying and punishing the former. What do you want: a genuinely trustworthy friend or someone who feigns trustworthiness just when it benefits them? In a series of experiments, Jillian Jordan and her colleagues show that people trust partners more when they “cooperate without looking”—helping without first checking what it will cost them—and that people check less when they know others can see whether they check.
If social goods like approval, trust, and esteem are primary rewards, and calculating behaviour sacrifices them, then uncalculating behaviour—and the feelings that make it come naturally—will be reinforced. However, it would make little sense for evolution to bake in a disposition towards unconditional trustworthiness.
For one thing, people must be sensitive to which traits and principles their social world rewards, which varies enormously. Universalist principles—treating everyone alike—pay off when people must frequently deal with strangers and impersonal institutions. By contrast, particularist loyalties and duties—favouring your own—pay off when social life is organised around a small, stable network of kin and partners, as it was for most of human history. We learn the values that are rewarded, but different worlds reward different values. And sometimes, material and social rewards select for sincere motives we—with our values—think of as immoral and dangerous, like a thirst for dominance, national glory, or racial supremacy.
More broadly, we are highly skilled at carving out a zone of interest: we crave social approval, but from audiences whose approval matters to us. This is why slaveowners could behave honourably towards one another while showing sociopathic disregard for the welfare of their slaves, an extreme version of a far more general pattern in human affairs.
Moreover, although internalised values are sincere, they never fully replace ordinary opportunism. When values do not pay in a particular context, they can be outweighed. If they stop paying altogether, they can be unlearned or overwritten, often quickly when the shift in incentives is strong enough.
This is why power so reliably corrupts. When principled people no longer need their supporters’ trust, or come to depend on a much smaller and different audience, they tend to unlearn their principles or interpret them in increasingly absurd ways. (Think of the communist dictators who presented totalitarian rule as advancing social equality.)
A Humanitarian of Tinder
Picture someone growing up in a comfortable liberal or lefty household, in a school and broader culture where caring about social justice is admired and many of the most revered figures helped the least fortunate (Jesus, Gandhi, Mandela, etc.). He does not learn to fake concern for the poor, downtrodden, and oppressed. He learns genuine concern.
When the chance to volunteer abroad arises, his feelings are real. They do not replace his awareness that volunteering might make him look good, but they sit alongside it. When he returns, people respond warmly to his stories and photos, so he comes to enjoy sharing them. When he needs photos for his dating profile, he picks the ones with the smiling African children, not just because they make him look good but because he thinks they show that he is good.
At no point need he decide to fake concern for the global poor. Nevertheless, the pursuit of social rewards has shaped almost everything about this concern, above all its form: helping is most salient to him where it can be seen, photographed, and narrated to others, not where it can do the most good.
Social rewards also explain how his concern changes. Within a few years, he learns that posing with poor African children brings mockery rather than prestige, and he stops sharing the photos.
Once the audiences within his zone of interest change their minds about what good people do, he adjusts his values, much as people adjust their taste in clothes. Once upon a time, he was drawn to skinny jeans and conspicuous charity towards the global poor, but no longer.
Perhaps he develops values suited to the new world of social justice activism. Or maybe he discovers the community of “effective altruists”, who try to build a status economy organised around very different reputational criteria. Perhaps most realistically, once he has a wife, a mortgage, and kids, his need to compete for new dates and friends declines, and so does his desire to do abstract good in the world, on any interpretation of what that means. (It may be no coincidence that the passion for activism tends to take hold most strongly in youth when the sexual and status competition we experience is most intense.)
Whatever happens, I think we can be confident of one thing: although the pursuit of social, sexual, and material advantage constantly changes form, as do the moral economies and value systems built on it, it never goes away. Borrowing a closely related idea from Bourdieu, I call this a “conservation law” in the book: institutions, fashions, and prestige economies can redirect self-interest and status competition, but never abolish them.
And I call the creatures so adept at getting ahead in the worlds built on this competition—us—“sincere strategists”. Our values are genuine, but they track what pays, usually without any conscious calculation at all.
Why Any of This Matters
First, this model reconciles the competing intuitions people have grappled with since Plato. It illuminates what Kant called the “unsocial sociability” of human nature, and why “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” The idealists are right that people, or at least some people, really do care. Apparent caring is not just an act, nor is it merely a self-deceptive cover story for “hidden motives”. It can be both of these things, but in many cases it is completely genuine.
However, the cynics are right that grubby motives run through human moral life, not just competing with our values but regulating how we interpret and weigh them and, over longer timescales, constructing them.
The dove is real, but it is a servant of the serpent and the wolf.
Second, it should change how we view moral reform. We should never try to eliminate self-interest and status competition, or replace them with sincere, autonomous virtue. We should channel them to better ends—for example, to acts of virtue that achieve results rather than ones that photograph well.
At its best, effective altruism tries to do this. It is less about “doing good better” in the abstract than about doing competitive altruism better, tying status more closely to actions that do good rather than merely seem good. No more status for posing with poor African children, or for writing paywalled academic articles about how posing with poor African children reproduces colonial logics. Take the damn pledge and give your money to evidence-backed causes instead.
Finally, although this perspective is cynical in some respects, it has given me more sympathy for humanity, not less. Cynicism is usually corrosive because it is selective, erecting a barrier between us (those who really care) and them (the status-seeking frauds). This view brings us closer together. The humanitarians of Tinder were doing what everyone does, including those who mocked them: acquiring the values their social worlds rewarded and displaying them to audiences they wanted to impress.
Deep down, we are all humanitarians of Tinder.
Further Reading
This is a small list of many, many influences on the ideas in this essay. ‘Why It’s Ok To Be Cynical’ (hopefully published next year) features a much larger set of references.
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction
Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools
Philip Tetlock, ‘Social Functionalist Frameworks for Judgment and Choice’
Moshe Hoffman and Erez Yoeli, Hidden Games
Manvir Singh, Richard Wrangham and Luke Glowacki, ‘Self-Interest and the Design of Rules’
Manvir Singh and Moshe Hoffman, ‘A Reputation-Based Theory of Principled Behaviour’
Nichola Raihani, The Social Instinct
David Pinsof, ‘The Evolution of Social Paradoxes’
Will Storr, The Status Game
You can also find my recent co-authored book here: The Social Roots of Delusions
I kept thinking about The Last Ditch story when I was reading this. It’s like a lab experiment for observing the forces that shape ostensibly virtuous behaviors (complete with surgical masks!).