Flickr photo by Timothy Hamilton
Yahoo is trying to spark random acts of kindness around the world through the 600 million people who are part of the Yahoo “community.”
They ask people to visit kindness.yahoo.com and post online status messages describing their good deeds, inspiring others to reciprocate and amplify their actions.
They call their effort “You In?” since they encourage those doing good deeds to add this to the end of their posts. For example, “I just dropped off a coat from my closet at a homeless shelter, You In?” or “I paid the toll fee for the car behind me, You In?” The messages appear in that poster’s Yahoo! status and can be shared via social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. Visitors can also see an interactive global map on the campaign’s website at kindness.yahoo.com.
Given that the effort encourages altruism, it is ironic that Yahoo! seeded the program by giving $100 to early participants.
The program builds on the “Pay It Forward” concept (serial reciprocity); and there was already an on-line version of Pay it Forward developed called The Giving Game.
Nick Christakis and James Fowler in their book Connected have an interesting experiment to test altruism and the “pay it forward” concept. But for example, in an experiment they conducted of “paying it forward”, 120 individuals who didn’t know each other were paired off for five rounds of cooperation games involving groups of 4 people each. They never encountered the same individuals. Individuals could decide how how much to share of an initial pile of money and then all groups were told what others had done, the individuals were reshuffled into new groups 4 more times and this process was repeated. They found that for every extra dollar that a person (call him/her A) gave in round one to members of A’s group (call them B), those Bs gave twenty cents more in round 2 to their new groups (we’ll call these individuals C). Then the C individuals each gave five cents more in round three. This was true even though it was not reciprocity since B’s generosity was to new strangers as was C’s, since the groups were reshuffled. Since each B individual and C joined three new individuals in the next round, there was a multiplicative impact of A’s generosity of $1.00 to generate an additional $1.05 of generosity in future rounds. Here the multiplier was restrained by the survey design that had groups of 4, but in principle it is possible that a higher multiplier might be found depending on the group size.
Notable Acts of Kindness under the Yahoo! effort:
– “I traded in a $100 bill for 100 one-dollar bills and wrote a note on each that read: ‘Please take this dollar bill, add one dollar bill, and pass it on.’”
– “I helped an 85-year-old neighbor bring her Xmas decorations down from the rafters — all 12 boxes!”
– “I helped an elderly lady carry her groceries to her car.”
– “I am baking Christmas cakes to share with friends in need of help.”
– “I dropped off supplies at the local Humane Society and at the local women’s shelter.”
Social Capital Blog 