Sander van der Linden on Viral Altruism

About this Podcast

Social media users will have come across social campaigns which appeal to the morals of their audiences and ask for a small effort to support or propagate the campaign. ‘Viral altruism’ is a phenomenon whereby such campaigns cause a behaviour, which is then quickly spread through the network effect of social media. The prime example of this is the ALS ice bucket challenge.

In this discussion social psychologist Sander van der Linden delves into the how and why of campaigns which result in viral altruism. “The idea,” van der Linden says, “is that you can ‘catch’ altruism in a behavioral way. When someone acts altruistically online, you catch that behavior as a social contagion, which then causes you to adopt that behavior and encourage other people in your network to also engage in that behavior, which then spreads quickly and rapidly.”

van der Linden describes the mechanics of these processes using something he calls SMArT, which breaks down online altruistic efforts by their social influence, moral imperative, affective reactions, and translational impact. Using datasets of unique events, van der Linden has been able to find commonalities between viral campaigns. This knowledge has potential for leveraging digital networks for long-term engagement with issues such as climate change, though the short-lived nature of viral altruism may act as a barrier to this. His current research looks into the #MeToo movement to see if it fits into his model of viral altruism.

Transcript
Key

DE: DAVID EDMONDS

SVDL: SANDER VAN DER LINDEN

DE:This is Social Science Bites with me, David Edmonds. Social Science Bites is a series of interviews with leading social scientists and is made in association with Sage Publishing. Remember the Ice Bucket Challenge some years ago? People volunteered to have buckets of ice cold water thrown over them. It raised a lot of money, but can you recollect the charity it was all for? I doubt it. Why do some causes go viral, while most others do not? If you were a charity, you’d really want to discover the secret ingredients to a successful internet campaign, and that’s where psychologist Sander van der Linden from Cambridge University comes in. Sander van der Linden, welcome to Social Science Bites.

SVDL:Pleasure to be here.

DE:We’re talking today about altruism and going viral. Sketch the broad topic.

SVDL:Well, the idea of viral altruism really is that you can catch altruism in a behavioral way. If someone acts altruistically online, you catch that behavior as a social contagion, which then causes you to adopt the behavior, encourage other people in your network to also engage in that behavior, which then spreads quickly and rapidly from one person to another until eventually, it takes over the entire network, and which essentially got this idea of viral altruism.

DE:Give us an example of something that’s gone viral that is to do with altruism.

SVDL:The most prominent example that I’ve analyzed is the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. So this happened a few years ago. At the time, it was the most unprecedented viral campaign that we’ve seen. Just in brief, this was for a very rare degenerative neurological disease, ALS, and the purpose of the campaign was to raise our attention in a very unconventional way, by essentially having people pour bucket of ice cold water over their head, tape it on video, post it online, make a donation, and encourage all of their friends in their network to do the same, by public challenging people. That went viral and took over Facebook, YouTube, and it’s often called the most viral social cause campaign that we’ve seen today.

DE:And you’ve looked at what it was that made that campaign and others like it so successful.

SVDL:That’s right. So I was intensely curious about what made that campaign go viral. So you might think, why would someone pour a bucket of ice cold water over their head willingly to support a cause? It’s fascinating because when you look at how intense that campaign was, in terms of how many famous people, celebrities, role models, participating, I think a campaign of intrigue. And I found out that it actually adopted lots of well-known psychological levers, causing people to behave in altruistic ways. And I started noticing other campaigns that used some of these same levers, and then ultimately, I condensed that into a framework that I use the acronym SMART to explain why these causes go viral, where SMART stands for Social Influence, Moral Imperative, Affective Reactions, and Translational Impact. And I use that as a metaphor and formula for why a lot of these campaigns go viral while others do not.

DE:We’ll get on to SMART soon, but are there enough of these campaigns to extrapolate lessons?

SVDL:I think that’s a great question. So what makes them unique is their rarity in some sense, and so it’s actually difficult to get a large number of these cases. So all of the examples that I’ve looked at, so the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, Save Darfur campaign, This was about genocide, Facebook organ donor initiative, all of these campaigns that essentially exhibit this pattern of going viral very fast and then also exhibiting some other unique behavioral characteristics all share these commonalities. I’m still monitoring new viral campaigns that come out like Me Too see to what extent they are consistent with the evidence, and I think our ideas might evolve about this over time. But certainly, there’s a lot more cases that do not go viral than cases that actually do go viral. So I think to the extent that we can extrapolate, we are dealing with a relatively small sample size. But it is striking and interesting that these commonalities are in fact so prominent among the small sample that we do have.

DE:So let’s go to your formula, the SMART formula-- S, the first letter in SMART stands for?

SVDL:Social influence. We’re all influenced by the opinions of people that we care about. We’re constantly influencing each other with everything that we say, so social influence is part of life. What these campaigns tend to do is leverage that process in a very specific manner. So, for example, with the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, what happened was that basically you see all of your friends and other people you care about engaging in this behavior, which we call descriptive influence. And so it’s basically telling you that everyone’s doing something, and so that’s sending a signal, through the noise of all the information you receive on a daily basis, that must be important. At the same time, and this is perhaps even more important, you’re being challenged directly to actually follow suit and engage in that behavior. And so if you were not to conform, you might almost look like a bad person. And so, very strong social factors.

DE:Being challenged because when somebody puts a bucket of cold water over their head, they then nominated somebody else to do the same, and it’s difficult to resist the pressure from a friend, imploring you to follow on.

SVDL:That’s right, especially in public.

DE:That’s S in SMART. Then we have M. That stands for?

SVDL:Moral imperative, so moral issues. So people tend to engage more strongly with issues that cut across moral dimensions. So, for example, social injustice, suffering, and disease, conflict, but also things like compassion and empathy and basically caring about other people. And so, yes, when an issue has a strong moral dimension, so it cuts across these fundamental dimensions of what we think is right or wrong in the world, that tends to be an important ingredient as well.

DE:SM, let’s move on to AR.

SVDL:AR stands for affective reactions. By that, we mean emotions. So there’s lots of research that shows that content that is emotional tends to go viral much more so than content that has no emotional dimension. This can be both positive and negative. Negative, you can think of emotions like moral outrage or anger or any sort of strong emotion that motivates you to take action. And positive emotions include things like empathy as an emotional contagion, so we tend to feel what other people feel when we see suffering or compassion or other positive emotions, like happiness, that can be shared collectively, even in networks. And so those are both important. So, to some extent, positive emotions go viral more often than negative emotions. But the key thing is that emotions are a crucial part of virality.

DE:And how did you measure whether or not people were feeling moral outrage, for example? That’s not something you can obviously observe if you’re watching their videos online.

SVDL:That’s right. It’s not something that you can automatically observe, but what we do know, and perhaps the famous saying, the suffering of a single person is a tragedy, but the death of a million is a statistic. All right, so from the literature, we know that people care much more about single individuals and suffering and sadness that they can read in a single individual versus when you talk about big non-emotional things like climate change, for example, which is very difficult for people to relate to. And so this is something we call the identifiable victim effect. So when people can identify with a single victim, people tend to feel a lot more emotional. And it so happens that in the ALS Ice Bucket campaign, there were lots of clear victims of the disease that were identifiable for people. Now, I think the word “victim”, whether or not we want to use that to describe people who have the disease or whether people have the disease feel victim to the disease is something else, but what’s important emotionally for people is that lots of these role models were used that people can relate to and in a much more emotional way than a big statistic.

DE:So finally, the T. That stands for translational impact. Tell me what that means.

SVDL:Translational impact is really moving from slacktivism or clicktivism to sustained long-term impact over time. So some people have commented that the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was essentially a wet t-shirt contest for armchair clicktivists. Clicktivism is really the idea that instead of opening up your wallet and making a donation, you click on a post or you like it and you share it and you feel that you’ve done your bit without actually contributing hard cash or volunteer hours or any other form of sustained commitment. So that’s clicktivism. Slacktivism is the idea-- it’s very similar. Instead of going out and actually rallying for a cause, you, again, share post or you read a blog or you click on something and assume that it’s influential. But often, it actually isn’t. Most of these campaigns fail to translate social momentum into sustained long-term commitment from people, and that’s what the T stands for.

DE:Does that matter if there’s a spotlight shone on a particular cause in a particular period and raises a lot of money for that cause? Does it matter if it can’t be replicated in commitment over the next year will decade?

SVDL:My way of trying to think about this is that we can think of this altruism as having a slow and a fast component or an intuitive and a deliberate component. Sometimes, the fast altruism might be desirable. For example, when there is a major natural disaster and we need donations fast to help rebuild a city, we can ranking one off actions, and that’s absolutely fine. Sometimes though, when we’re dealing with long-term issues, like public health and obesity or climate change or other causes that require people to really commit in the long term, that may require a different strategy from people to help sustain that commitment. So the viral component can help attract attention, but then, we need to transform that into a more long-term sustained plan of action.

DE:It’s not so pleasant having freezing cold water poured over one’s head. That’s something weird, isn’t there, about the fact that you have to suffer before I’m willing to pay you some money or pay money to a cause. It’ll be much better, wouldn’t it, if nobody had to suffer and I paid that money directly into the charity without you having to put ice over your head.

SVDL:That is actually a great question, and that raises an interesting question in terms of the debate between the emotional altruism and maybe the rational side of altruism, because it doesn’t seem rational to pour a cold bucket of ice water over your head. What lots of people actually don’t understand is that the ice water is supposed to freeze up your muscles, which signifies the nature of the disease, which wasn’t really communicated in a clear way. Many people, in fact, did not understand that. The other interesting part of that story, a previous colleague of mine at Princeton, Eldar Shafir did a study of what he called the Martyrdom Effect, basically, people value donating more if they have to suffer a little. And so it sounds like it’s irrational, but often these things are important for people. If you have to suffer a little, step into the shoes of what somebody else is going through, part of what empathy actually is, that makes you value your donation even more because now you’ve suffered a little to help someone else.

DE:Describe your methodology, looking at these cases that have gone viral. You’ve had access to just public data, basically.

SVDL:That’s right. So I was using a multi-pronged strategy, but the first course of action for me was to actually look at behavioral data that exists out in the world. So a good example of that is Wikipedia. So Wikipedia hits are available publicly. If you look at the ALS Wikipedia page, it is not well visited on a regular basis, unfortunately-- a few thousand a month, maybe. During the campaign, there was such a noticeable shift. There were hundreds of thousands of views for that page that even, to some, it precludes the need for doing any sophisticated analysis on it because the trend was so obvious. It was the same with donations to the ALS organization, which were obtained through IRS records, verified tax returns. You see this massive spike. So the average was around $23 million a year in US dollars. During the campaign, there was an extra $100 million. But then, after the campaign ended, it went back to about $23 million. In fact, exactly to what was happening the year before. Same with Wikipedia hits after the campaign ended and went back slowly to ultimately a few thousand. So another methodology was to look at YouTube videos, because there were hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos. And so we tried to analyze what people were doing in the videos and whether that predicted whether or not people said that they donated, how much they engaged with the cause, and whether or not they’ve nominated other people.

DE:What did you find from analyzing the videos?

SVDL:Right, so we’re fortunate enough to work with a company that helped us extract lots of data from these videos. What we found doing the analysis is something very intriguing. So most people didn’t actually mention ALS as a cause in the videos, or a lot of people actually didn’t mention it. But what was crucial is that if you look at whether or not people indicated that they’ve made some sort of effort to donate in the videos, those people who said or mentioned ALS were five times more likely to do so than people who did not mention ALS. And so, just actually relating to the cause in a slightly deeper sense was actually very important in terms of eliciting a more sustained action from people. For me, what’s crucial about this campaign is that the pay it forward mechanism. So you nominate other people, then other people nominate other people, and that’s what causes of virality. And so I wanted to see where what predicts this nomination process. And what was interesting is that the more people were present in the video-- so the bigger the combined network, essentially-- the more nominations were made. If you were in a video by yourself, you would maybe nominate one or two of your friends, but that number increased by quite a bit as a function of the number of friends that were present in the video because you had a bigger network to draw from.

DE:Both governments and charities need to engage citizens in various causes. You’ve touched on this already, but let’s talk about the policy implications of your work.

SVDL:Well, I think there’s a number of interesting perspectives, and let me start with an anecdote where somebody rang my door and asked for a donation. I was very happy to pull out my wallet and actually make a physical contribution, but that wasn’t possible because now everything is online. I had to sign up online, and I want to know, why are you ringing my door if it’s all online now. And I think that is an increasing trend where most of this behavior is actually happening online, and we have to calibrate our understanding of what altruism and charity means in an online context, especially for policy. I don’t think we’ve sufficiently thought about this idea of fast and slow altruism, that for governments, sometimes when bad things happen and we need an immediate response, we can leverage the idea that billions of people are now connected with each other online, and we can leverage that for specific policy purposes. Some challenges, though, require decades of support from people, as we talked about public health and climate change. But, in fact, virility might be good for getting people’s attention, but it might also backfire in the sense that once people feel that they’ve contributed, they go on do something else. And so it might actually require a whole different strategy to sustain people’s commitment in the long term. And I think for policymakers to try to figure out what kind of altruism do they want from people and how that interacts with the online environment, I think is crucial.

DE:Suppose a charity came to you and they said, we want a fast campaign, we want a campaign that goes viral. You’ve got the formula. You could tell them how to do it.

SVDL:In theory, yes. Of course, virality is hard to predict. There’s other factors that go into it, aside from the SMART criteria. But I would fairly confidently say that if you want the cause to go viral, it is absolutely crucial that it is embedded in some sort of social process. For example, the Me Too campaign. What’s brilliant about that is the hashtag Me Too. It’s designed to be social, for people to tag on to the campaign. So have that social element, make it moral for people because people care more about stuff that’s either right or wrong or somewhere in between. Illicit emotions from people, and then think about how you’re going to engage people in the long term. My other question would be, for charities, are you sure that you want to engage people one off, or is your goal to try to get people to sign up for the long term, because my answer might actually depend on that very question.

DE:Something that matters long term is climate change. That doesn’t seem to press any of the buttons you’ve been talking about. For example, people don’t get really outraged-- they ought to, but they don’t get outraged by climate change, and I wonder whether this explains why it’s so difficult to motivate people to do anything about it and what techniques we could use to try and get people a bit more actively involved in combating climate change.

SVDL:To some extent, I would say that you’re absolutely correct. There is no social pressure. If I don’t recycle, people are not judging me, they’re not necessarily going to exclude me from the group. But it is true for other behaviors, but not climate change. And so there is no social pressure. Lots of work shows that people don’t really view it as a moral issue. We don’t really feel particularly strong about it emotionally because it’s a very abstract issue. Climate change is interesting because we’re a part of the problem. Maybe that’s why it’s a difficult moral question for people to think about because you would have to blame yourself to some extent. It’s very uncomfortable. Now how can we fix this? I would say that one of the biggest factors for me in all of this work is the distinction between extrinsic incentives and intrinsic motivation. So a lot of these viral campaigns tend to leverage extrinsic incentives. Extrinsic, I mean external, in the moment. You’re doing it because other people are doing it. You’re being pressured, it’s hyped right now, there’s social momentum. You’re not doing it because it’s something you deeply care about. And so how do you create that intrinsic motivation is incredibly important and it’s a difficult question because policies, they’re often focused exclusively on extrinsic incentives. I’m going to give you a tax rebate to do something good. Whereas the sort of warm glow emotional empathy doesn’t really come into play, even though it’s important for fostering this intrinsic internal self-determined motivation. The way to create that is people have to internalize new norms over time. So let me give you an example. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge lasted four weeks. You see the pattern. The half life, as we call it, of this altruism is very short, then it dissipates. Maybe the window wasn’t big enough for people to really internalize this as a new norm, that caring about these rare diseases is something that every now and then we have to think about. When it comes to other important issues, maybe people aren’t exposed enough to a new idea or a new norm or a new proposal to really internalize it and make it their own.

DE:Almost by definition, virality is internet-based. Is the internet and technology a prism for understanding how humans behave, or is it actually altering our behavior and altering our response to altruism?

SVDL:I do think it’s changing our response to altruism. If you think about the evolution of cooperation among humans, for hundreds of thousands of years, we’ve interacted face to face. That’s how our altruism evolved. Even when we talk about charities, door to door, people elicit contributions not online, and so the online environment is something we’re not used to. It elicits different kinds of behaviors from us. We engage with content in a more superficial way. Imagine you could gather 100 individuals at a square-- that’s overwhelming, I imagine, getting tweeted at 100 times a day. I think it’s just fundamentally shaping people’s attention span, the way that we care about causes, the way we interact with each other. I think it’ll be very exciting area to see what’s going to happen with that and how we’re going to adapt and respond to these challenges.

DE:Sander van der Linden, thank you very much indeed.

SVDL:Thank you for having me.

DE:Social Science Bites is made in association with Sage Publishing. For more interviews, go to socialsciencespace.com.

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