It seems notable to me that these "Humanitarians of Tinder" would have been attacked from both the left and the right in such similar ways - the left saying they are "playing white savior", and the right saying they are "virtue signaling".
How refreshing to see morality through a pragmatic frame like this. It seems obvious that it's almost impossible to find a charitable act that contains no self-interested dimension. What we are probably best advised to care about is the outcome. If Josh got laid AND some children somewhere got clean water, great. Meanwhile, we might notice that the tired old deontological morality of the 'anti-colonialist' academic might have got that person laid too, but probably helped no one else. Let's hear it for selfish morality that makes the world slightly measurably better.
A lot of the founders, like Madison and Jay were very adept at understanding these grubby motives and how to channel them through well aligned incentives towards the public good. And somewhat surprisingly they did it before Darwin.
I think Hobbes said something similar. You don't need Darwin to understand human nature. As Dan notes, Plato understood the argument -- he just didn't want to believe it.
A couple of worries come up for me about your view here:
1) While you don't deny human reason and agency matter, I worry this view downweights them too heavily. Two examples come to mind. First, the abolition of slavery is hard to reconcile with the idea that we're motivated by material and social advantage. Second, when we look at pre-modern times, we see a large variation in the character and morality of monarchs living in similar cultures and facing similar incentives.
2) Even if you stipulate this view is correct, I worry that it's actually bad the believe it. Perhaps people who believe this become more selfish, shallow, or status-seeking than they would have been otherwise because it gives them "permission" to indulge in these impulses. Anecdotally it seems like cynical people are less moral and more selfish on average (look at Donald Trump as perhaps the most extreme example).
It’s worth considering why slavery was abolished just as it was being outcompeted as an economic system by more mechanised, high human capital industrialisation.
And as Dan says, I think well calibrated cynicism can make you more compassionate and more humble precisely because you have a realistic assessment of human frailties, including your own.
For example, I know that I have a weak and inconsistent charitable impulse that is strongly shaped by status competition and so forth, so with this in mind I decided a while ago to just set up a couple of monthly donations to GiveWell and another local charity that would happen automatically and I never need to think about again, except when humble bragging online. So being attentive to your own cognitive limitations makes you better at setting up your own incentives/disincentives to encourage you to behave better.
The relation between morality and reputation is a little bit more complex. Humanitarians for Tinder are motivated only by reputation: they display a "moral" attitude cynically, only to earn prestige and reputation. But in your evolutionary perspective, a moral trait can have a reputational function without being displayed for reputational motivations. As Sperber and Baumard (2012) say: "Just as sex serves procreation without being motivated by it, morality can serve reputation without being motivated by reputational calculation". The need to have a good reputation (for example, of a reliable cooperator) may have shaped our moral attitudes, but this doesn't mean that we are all cynical each time we behave morally. Cf. D. Sperber, N. Baumard (2012) "Moral Reputation. An Evolutionary and Cognitive Perspective", Mind&Language.
Looking forward to reading your book. From my narrow window onto the world it seems that trying to nail down why humans behave the way they do in the abstract in a way that separates us from other animals is an exercise in futility. The basic drives are the same. Live long enough to reproduce or at least to help ensure that your relatives do. Everything else, all the details of how that is carried out, are dictated over time by the particular circumstances we find ourselves in as we grow and live in the world and the social context within which we are raised. That people can be both virtuous and evil , that their motives for undertaking particular actions can be at once noble and selfish, that a great father can be a miserable boss, that one person’s focus can seem to be entirely external to their immediate environment while another’s is concentrated close to home,…is an inevitable outcome and is not remotely surprising given the myriad possible circumstances that we might find ourselves. Trying to accurately apply general conclusions about group behaviour to specific individual is a very tall order.
Unsurprisingly, I basically agree. But you are missing a trick about one of the things that made humanitarians of Tinder funny: that it was just obviously absurd to juxtapose a picture of charity work and virtuous behaviour with a desire to get bonked. The apparent lack of self-awareness on behalf of the person doing the highly incongruent juxtaposition only heightened the absurdity. Which heightened the funny.
There is more in the profile pics than is dream’t of in your philosophy!
I was defending a version of this worldview to my Catholic uncle earlier this year when we were talking about international law, to which he is very strongly ethically committed.
I was trying to convince him that international law cannot be effectively defended by anyone who forgets that all such laws are in fact mutually beneficial agreements, made in a state of relative anarchy.
Which is to say that if you insist international law says a country must fight with a hand tied behind its back in an existential conflict, then they will simply ignore the law. So if you want to preserve international law as a very valuable and important institution, then you have to be cynical and pragmatic about the incentives of all the involved actors, and try to channel those incentives as productively as possible.
Sincere strategist matches what I saw, with one addition from close up. The test comes when the audience goes. Somebody retires, or leaves a congregation, and a set of values that felt like bedrock goes strangely silent. What they describe is losing themselves, and they are right, because the caring was real and so was its dependence on being seen. Fraud never comes into it. A few of the values survive the empty room. Those were the only ones I ever felt sure about.
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!).
Dan, as always, this one is well-researched, and I’m even surprised that my country is being mentioned as one of the examples (I didn’t know Mentawai people have those kinds of norms, but I suspect other etnographical research in different parts of the country will show simmiliar types of motives).
With that said, as one of the commenter has pointed out, what are the consequences of people actually believing this stuff?
So, while I agree that it is okay to be cynical, and as one other commenter have pointed out that recognizing our limitations can help set up incentives on behaving better, I’m less confident this happening at scale. Wouldn’t an interesting question would be about how this play out at a societal level?
This was an amazing post and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Nonetheless, I believe it low-key ignores one very important detail: at any point in time in a specific societal circle, there are different levels of genuine caring (which I would prefer to call internalized values) and opportunistic performative caring and in an evolutionary sense it matters to be able to tell these levels apart. So, although it is possible that anachronistic reading of Humanitarians of Tinder makes them look more cringe and performative, I am leaning toward believing that even in the haydays of helping global south in nice photographed poses, those that used them on their Tinder profiles were perceived, judged, and treated differently than those who only shared their photos with family and close friends. And for good reasons. The level of obvious benefits (specially in sexual competition) that one receives for good deeds have always been a source of distrust, and again for good reasons
Your sincere strategist and Simler and Hanson's press secretary look like the same animal to me, and I think the version you are arguing against is cruder than the book's.
Their claim wasn't that the caring is faked, the press secretary believes its own briefings. That's the mechanism, not an exception to it.
Where you go further, and where I think you are right, is the construction claim: they explain why the motive stays hidden, you explain where the sincere value came from in the first place.
Hanson would say the elephant was always doing the selecting.
It seems you left out an important, and commonly overlooked "primary" reward and punisher, empathy (a sympathetic emotional response to someone else's feelings). Parents will feel crappy hearing their baby cry, thus attempt to provide comfort, but also feeling good when the baby is peacefully sleeping. Likewise, a passerby may (or may not) feel guilty walking by a homeless person without providing any assistance, but may feel better giving that person a handout.
I think empathy is a powerful motivator, maybe not as powerful as status or some others, and is too frequently left out of morality discussions. In my view it is the only reason people "cooperate without looking." If someone cares about other people, has empathy for them, then helping others becomes natural. But of course people have wide-ranging feelings of empathy, and often societies enforce some kind of social code to get some people (those with little empathy) to treat others nicely.
What this seems to imply is that here is a kind of social death for keeping a consistent set of idealistic virtues. That is, if you were to live your life upon a principle or set of principles, you would isolate yourself.
That is until you find the group--whether its a church, temple, cult, or subculture dedicated to that principle, which will reinforce it and make you take that principle more seriously.
As a person who has principles and an allergy to cult-like groups, I am forced to sort of float around different types of people, unable to connect with many people on a level of belief or ideals.
It seems notable to me that these "Humanitarians of Tinder" would have been attacked from both the left and the right in such similar ways - the left saying they are "playing white savior", and the right saying they are "virtue signaling".
How refreshing to see morality through a pragmatic frame like this. It seems obvious that it's almost impossible to find a charitable act that contains no self-interested dimension. What we are probably best advised to care about is the outcome. If Josh got laid AND some children somewhere got clean water, great. Meanwhile, we might notice that the tired old deontological morality of the 'anti-colonialist' academic might have got that person laid too, but probably helped no one else. Let's hear it for selfish morality that makes the world slightly measurably better.
A lot of the founders, like Madison and Jay were very adept at understanding these grubby motives and how to channel them through well aligned incentives towards the public good. And somewhat surprisingly they did it before Darwin.
"Ambition must be made to counteract ambition."
- Federalist No. 51
The wisdom of founders was unmatched.
I think Hobbes said something similar. You don't need Darwin to understand human nature. As Dan notes, Plato understood the argument -- he just didn't want to believe it.
A couple of worries come up for me about your view here:
1) While you don't deny human reason and agency matter, I worry this view downweights them too heavily. Two examples come to mind. First, the abolition of slavery is hard to reconcile with the idea that we're motivated by material and social advantage. Second, when we look at pre-modern times, we see a large variation in the character and morality of monarchs living in similar cultures and facing similar incentives.
2) Even if you stipulate this view is correct, I worry that it's actually bad the believe it. Perhaps people who believe this become more selfish, shallow, or status-seeking than they would have been otherwise because it gives them "permission" to indulge in these impulses. Anecdotally it seems like cynical people are less moral and more selfish on average (look at Donald Trump as perhaps the most extreme example).
It’s worth considering why slavery was abolished just as it was being outcompeted as an economic system by more mechanised, high human capital industrialisation.
And as Dan says, I think well calibrated cynicism can make you more compassionate and more humble precisely because you have a realistic assessment of human frailties, including your own.
For example, I know that I have a weak and inconsistent charitable impulse that is strongly shaped by status competition and so forth, so with this in mind I decided a while ago to just set up a couple of monthly donations to GiveWell and another local charity that would happen automatically and I never need to think about again, except when humble bragging online. So being attentive to your own cognitive limitations makes you better at setting up your own incentives/disincentives to encourage you to behave better.
The relation between morality and reputation is a little bit more complex. Humanitarians for Tinder are motivated only by reputation: they display a "moral" attitude cynically, only to earn prestige and reputation. But in your evolutionary perspective, a moral trait can have a reputational function without being displayed for reputational motivations. As Sperber and Baumard (2012) say: "Just as sex serves procreation without being motivated by it, morality can serve reputation without being motivated by reputational calculation". The need to have a good reputation (for example, of a reliable cooperator) may have shaped our moral attitudes, but this doesn't mean that we are all cynical each time we behave morally. Cf. D. Sperber, N. Baumard (2012) "Moral Reputation. An Evolutionary and Cognitive Perspective", Mind&Language.
Looking forward to reading your book. From my narrow window onto the world it seems that trying to nail down why humans behave the way they do in the abstract in a way that separates us from other animals is an exercise in futility. The basic drives are the same. Live long enough to reproduce or at least to help ensure that your relatives do. Everything else, all the details of how that is carried out, are dictated over time by the particular circumstances we find ourselves in as we grow and live in the world and the social context within which we are raised. That people can be both virtuous and evil , that their motives for undertaking particular actions can be at once noble and selfish, that a great father can be a miserable boss, that one person’s focus can seem to be entirely external to their immediate environment while another’s is concentrated close to home,…is an inevitable outcome and is not remotely surprising given the myriad possible circumstances that we might find ourselves. Trying to accurately apply general conclusions about group behaviour to specific individual is a very tall order.
Unsurprisingly, I basically agree. But you are missing a trick about one of the things that made humanitarians of Tinder funny: that it was just obviously absurd to juxtapose a picture of charity work and virtuous behaviour with a desire to get bonked. The apparent lack of self-awareness on behalf of the person doing the highly incongruent juxtaposition only heightened the absurdity. Which heightened the funny.
There is more in the profile pics than is dream’t of in your philosophy!
Ha. Fair point.
I was defending a version of this worldview to my Catholic uncle earlier this year when we were talking about international law, to which he is very strongly ethically committed.
I was trying to convince him that international law cannot be effectively defended by anyone who forgets that all such laws are in fact mutually beneficial agreements, made in a state of relative anarchy.
Which is to say that if you insist international law says a country must fight with a hand tied behind its back in an existential conflict, then they will simply ignore the law. So if you want to preserve international law as a very valuable and important institution, then you have to be cynical and pragmatic about the incentives of all the involved actors, and try to channel those incentives as productively as possible.
Sincere strategist matches what I saw, with one addition from close up. The test comes when the audience goes. Somebody retires, or leaves a congregation, and a set of values that felt like bedrock goes strangely silent. What they describe is losing themselves, and they are right, because the caring was real and so was its dependence on being seen. Fraud never comes into it. A few of the values survive the empty room. Those were the only ones I ever felt sure about.
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!).
Dan, as always, this one is well-researched, and I’m even surprised that my country is being mentioned as one of the examples (I didn’t know Mentawai people have those kinds of norms, but I suspect other etnographical research in different parts of the country will show simmiliar types of motives).
With that said, as one of the commenter has pointed out, what are the consequences of people actually believing this stuff?
I would love to know your thoughts on Olga Stavrova’s work, particularly this line of research in cynicism: https://carlsonschool.umn.edu/sites/carlsonschool.umn.edu/files/2026-01/vohs-et-al-2020-jepg-victims-perpetrators.pdf
So, while I agree that it is okay to be cynical, and as one other commenter have pointed out that recognizing our limitations can help set up incentives on behaving better, I’m less confident this happening at scale. Wouldn’t an interesting question would be about how this play out at a societal level?
This was an amazing post and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Nonetheless, I believe it low-key ignores one very important detail: at any point in time in a specific societal circle, there are different levels of genuine caring (which I would prefer to call internalized values) and opportunistic performative caring and in an evolutionary sense it matters to be able to tell these levels apart. So, although it is possible that anachronistic reading of Humanitarians of Tinder makes them look more cringe and performative, I am leaning toward believing that even in the haydays of helping global south in nice photographed poses, those that used them on their Tinder profiles were perceived, judged, and treated differently than those who only shared their photos with family and close friends. And for good reasons. The level of obvious benefits (specially in sexual competition) that one receives for good deeds have always been a source of distrust, and again for good reasons
Your sincere strategist and Simler and Hanson's press secretary look like the same animal to me, and I think the version you are arguing against is cruder than the book's.
Their claim wasn't that the caring is faked, the press secretary believes its own briefings. That's the mechanism, not an exception to it.
Where you go further, and where I think you are right, is the construction claim: they explain why the motive stays hidden, you explain where the sincere value came from in the first place.
Hanson would say the elephant was always doing the selecting.
You are saying it also did the building.
It seems you left out an important, and commonly overlooked "primary" reward and punisher, empathy (a sympathetic emotional response to someone else's feelings). Parents will feel crappy hearing their baby cry, thus attempt to provide comfort, but also feeling good when the baby is peacefully sleeping. Likewise, a passerby may (or may not) feel guilty walking by a homeless person without providing any assistance, but may feel better giving that person a handout.
I think empathy is a powerful motivator, maybe not as powerful as status or some others, and is too frequently left out of morality discussions. In my view it is the only reason people "cooperate without looking." If someone cares about other people, has empathy for them, then helping others becomes natural. But of course people have wide-ranging feelings of empathy, and often societies enforce some kind of social code to get some people (those with little empathy) to treat others nicely.
Caravaggio — The Calling of Saint Matthew
Apt.
What this seems to imply is that here is a kind of social death for keeping a consistent set of idealistic virtues. That is, if you were to live your life upon a principle or set of principles, you would isolate yourself.
That is until you find the group--whether its a church, temple, cult, or subculture dedicated to that principle, which will reinforce it and make you take that principle more seriously.
As a person who has principles and an allergy to cult-like groups, I am forced to sort of float around different types of people, unable to connect with many people on a level of belief or ideals.