Selfish Giving

picture by giverculture.com

Although the idea of gift economy has only come to fruition recently, the concept of giving without any expectation of reciprocity has been going on for centuries and can date back as early as the Stone Age.

When contemplating further on the gift economy I began to ask myself this question: Why do human beings give? What is it about giving without expecting that makes us want to give more?

Then something inside of me clicked: giving not only brings joy to the receiver but gives the giver a sense of satisfaction. It makes us feel good about ourselves. So as a cynic would put it giving is not only an act of honor and kindness but also a selfish act since the act itself makes the giver feel more competent.

Sounds confusing? Well it is since it is a theory studied in Psychology and is known as Psychological Egoism.

This idea centralizes around the notion that human beings perform acts that are in essence self-serving. For example, if I decide to give someone a gift, in return I feel good that I have made that person feel good. On the contrary, if I did something good for someone that I knew would make me feel horrible, that act would no longer be called giving a gift but rather sacrificing or giving up.

We can take psychological egoism and examine it in terms of the Gift Economy.
Open-source sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr tend to thrive on just that. For example, when you post a video on YouTube and you notice all the hits you have received, you in turn feel good about yourself. Similarly, when you display a picture that you have taken on Flickr and you read all the positive comments on it, you feel more competent.

As Tara Hunt highlights in "The Gift", the gift economy is eminent. It is just important to acknowledge and accept that the gift in itself is also a self-serving act. We do think about how we will feel after giving flowers to our partners as a way to say "I'm sorry." We do have ulterior motives when helping a friend in med school write a paper.

Because as Patrick West, author of Conspicuous Compassion writes: "sometimes, the only person you care about is you."