Online and on-screen reactions to the conflict reflect a subtle but important shift in Western attitudes, driven by three related forces: technology, demography and ideology. Britain’s King Charles is visiting Kenya—and will have a harder time navigating historical tensions than his mother ever did (09:56). And sleeping less tight: Paris is not the only place bedbugs are on the rise (18:24).
Arunabh Dastidar has a background in engineering, starting his coding years in his teens. In fact, he was building and selling web products even prior to college. He spends most of his free time thinking about tech and startups, but when he is not, he plays acoustic guitar and attends music festivals. He enjoys traveling and trying food across the world, mentioning that Tokyo ruined Sushi for him.
Arunabh was on a very important call, and his excel sheet was crashing. He looked left and right, and couldn't find anything to support what he needed. He found some co-founders, and built the solution he wished he had for the industry.
Is giving to a charitable cause essentially equivalent to any other economic decision made by a human being, bounded by the same rational and irrational inputs as any other expenditure? Based on research by psychologist Deborah Small and others working in the area of philanthropy and altruism, the answer is a resounding no.
In this Social Science Bites podcast, Small, the Adrian C. Israel Professor of Marketing at Yale University, details some of the thought processes and outcomes that research provides about charitable giving. For example, she tells interviewer David Edmonds, that putting a face to the need – such as a specific hungry child or struggling parent – tends to be more successful at producing giving than does a statistic revealing that tens of thousands of children or mothers are similarly suffering.
This “identifiable victim effect,” as the phenomenon is dubbed, means that benefits of charity may be inequitably distributed and thus do less to provide succor than intended. “[T]he kind of paradox here,” Small explains, “is that we end up in many cases concentrating resources on one person or on certain causes that happened to be well represented by a single identifiable victim, when we could ultimately do a lot more good, or save a lot more lives, help a lot more people, if – psychologically -- we were more motivated to care for ‘statistical’ victims.”
That particular effect is one of several Small discusses in the conversation. Another is the “drop in the bucket effect,” in which the magnitude of a problem makes individuals throw up their arms and not contribute rather than do even a small part toward remedying it.
Another phenomenon is the “braggarts dilemma,” in which giving is perceived as a good thing, but the person who notes their giving is seen as less admirable than the person whose gift is made without fanfare. And yet, the fact that someone goes public about their good deed can influence others to join in.
“[O]ne of the big lessons in marketing,” Small details, “is that word of mouth is really powerful. So, it's much more effective if I tell you about a product that I really like than if the company tells you about the product, right? You trust me; I'm like you. And that's a very effective form of persuasion, and it works for charities, too.”
Small joined the Yale School of Management in 2022, moving from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where she had been the Laura and John J. Pomerantz Professor of Marketing since 2015. In 2018, she was a fellow of the American Psychological Society and a Marketing Science Institute Scholar.
The new novel by Tan Twan Eng, The House of Doors, is a project of historical fiction immersed in the culturally rich island of Penang in the 1920s. A once revered, now flailing British writer arrives to visit a friend and find inspiration for a new book. What he uncovers – secret affairs, a murder trial, and deeply complicated relationships – proves to be more than he expected. In today's episode, NPR's Ari Shapiro asks the author about using the real writer W. Somerset Maugham as his protagonist, and about what writing from the perspective of the Brits reveals about imperialism.
Laura interviews Tom Morrissey, Founder of Healthy Business Group (HBG), an innovative healthcare benefit solution for businesses and solopreneurs, about ways to save money on health insurance.
Money Girl is hosted by Laura Adams. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
Cancel culture is something all academics are aware of and some are concerned about. Certainly that’s true of Greg Lukianoff who was the co-author (with Jonathan Haidt) of The Coddling of the American Mind(Penguin, 2018) and who has now co-authored (with Rikki Schlott) of The Canceling of the American Mind (Simon and Schuster, 2023). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones.
Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.
During that period, the British attempted to impose British culture on India. While they were somewhat successful, especially in exporting India’s national sport of cricket, they unknowingly were influenced by India as well.
It turns out that words from several languages on the subcontinents have made their way into English. Many of these words are common words you use every day, even though you might not know they have Indian origins.
Learn more about English language words of Indian origin on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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