Need help? Be sure to have “skin in the game”
Need help? Be sure to have “skin in the game”
Abstract
Assistance which attempts to promote the welfare of others independent of performance or effort, or in other ways undeserved or earned may have downsides. Kindness may over time result in recipients’ reduced effort. Thus, it is important not to allow honorable intentions in providing aid and assistance blind individuals to negative consequences—not the good envisioned. Examples of the harmful consequences of well-meaning assistance which often results in entitlement and dependency are discussed. Requiring “skin in the game” and providing autonomy-oriented help as practiced by Habitat for Humanity and some other charitable groups is offered as a possible alternative consideration.
Keywords: assistance, helping, dependency
Introduction
Theodore Roosevelt (cited in King, 2013) said: “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.” We can easily point to successful people who we admire who have sacrificed, gone through some painful experiences, and ultimately struggled to get to where they are.
There is a well-known story often told in some variation or another, about a young boy who watched a caterpillar struggling in a cocoon for several hours. In an attempt to help the caterpillar to emerge and become a butterfly, he opened the cocoon to release it but instead of a strong beautiful butterfly the caterpillar fell to the ground as its body was very small and wrinkled and its wings were all crumpled (Bliss and Burgess, 2012). Is struggling essential to experience living? Many would argue that struggle is an essential part of life to help us become stronger persons.
Brunson (2014) argues that struggling is important for elementary school children in order to develop “intellectual growth and development, independence, confidence, grit, problem-solving skills, emotional strength and perseverance”. In the field of business, Snyder (cited in King, 2013) believes that success and greatness go hand in hand with overcoming struggle. Snyder, the managing director of a leadership development consulting firm, recommends seeking challenging assignments and difficult goals, treat negative feedback as an opportunity for growth, and learn how to remain grounded and centered.
Like the caterpillar’s strength-building process in emerging from its cocoon, sometimes work, effort, and struggle are precisely what is needed for the next series of trials to be faced and should not be short-circuited or undermined by kindly intervention. Facing moderate difficulties may have long-term benefits. This has been referred to as stress inoculation (Meichenbaum, 1993) and steeling (Rutter, 2006). Additionally, Dienstbier’s (1989) theory of toughness holds that limited exposure to stressors—with opportunities for recovery in between—can “toughen” individuals and foster hardiness. Toughness results in psychological and physiological changes that make people more likely to perceive stressful situations in general as manageable (rather than overwhelming) and to cope effectively with them. Sheltering individuals from all stressors and negative events and protecting them from the natural consequences of their actions by providing excessive help may inhibit such toughness (Gray, 2013; Seery, 2011). Furthermore, DiCorcia and Tronick (2011) noted that infants develop a propensity for resilience based on successfully managing everyday difficulties, which is enabled by caregivers who are neither under-attentive nor over-attentive.
Those who refuse to exert effort or receive the wrong sort of help are often left unprepared to fight the next battle or overcome succeeding challenges—and thus have not “earned their wings.” Cohen and Wills (1985) described four very common types of help that people receive frequently: (a) esteem support (i.e., emotional support); (b) informational support (i.e., advice); (c) social companionship; and (d) instrumental support. Instrumental support, which is the type of help discussed in the present review, is defined by Cohen and Wills (1985) as “the provision of financial aid, material resources, and needed services” (p. 313). Helping occurs when a person who has superior resources directs those resources toward another person in need (Halabi, Nadler, & Dovidio, 2011). Thus, helping can easily convey caring and generosity on the part of the helper; however, sometimes help may very well be interpreted otherwise. Specifically, help can signify the dependence of the recipient on the help giver, producing negative consequences for the recipient. At the individual level, receiving help may threaten people’s personal self-esteem because it can imply the inferiority of the recipient, relative to the helper (Nadler, 1991, 1998; Nadler & Fisher, 1986), while also undermining their confidence and motivation to succeed (Fisher, Nadler, & Whitcher-Alagna, 1982).
Moreover, Shell and Eisenberg (1992) suggested that children often react negatively to offers of help that suggest that they are incompetent or not in control. They also suggested that instrumental help is more likely than other kinds of help to give children that impression. Older adults act similarly. Martini, Grusec, and Bernardini (2003) studied help between older mothers and adult daughters—including both mothers helping daughters and daughters helping mothers—and found that both mothers and daughters were uncomfortable receiving instrumental help, but less uncomfortable with receiving other kinds of help.
Thus, within the context of instrumental help there can be unplanned negative consequences and both long-term and short-term effects must be considered. This review aims to encourage a thoughtful consideration of the possibility that instrumental giving, aid, assistance, and relief may cause unintentional harm because of unwholesome dynamics and pathologies that fester under the cover of kindheartedness. In our analysis we explore the dynamics of helping by first noting the increased calls for societal compassion, altruism, and assistance. We then examine help within the context of the incentives from the perspective of the aid recipient and then present selected areas where help may be hurting recipients. We then offer a model of helping based on individuals having “skin in the game” as endorsed by Habitat for Humanity and conclude with a summary.
Calls for Increased Help, Assistance, and Other Prosocial Behavior
The criticism following the financial and political crisis of the Great Recession has highlighted the lack of societal responsibility and caring for others and in response to such severe criticism there have been calls for increased demonstrations of compassion, helpfulness, grace and prosocial acts toward those in need (Dutton, Workman, & Hardin, 2014; George, 2014). Such appeals are aimed at ultimately increasing “helping behaviors”, “caring behaviors”, and “altruism” (Brief & Motowidlo, 1986) that commonly includes kindness understood as generosity, nurturance, care, altruistic love, compassion, and “niceness” demonstrated by doing favors and good deeds for others, helping them, and taking care of them (Armstrong, 2010; Park, Peterson & Seligman, 2004). Nadler (2002) suggests that helping others is a positively valued behavior in most, if not all, human societies.
Additionally, a global community of scholars, writers, specialists, and teachers interested in demonstrating the well-being benefits of positive traits, states, and experiences such as compassion, altruism, and helping has recently emerged including the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California at Berkeley, the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University, the Compassion Lab at the University of Michigan, the Centre for Positive Psychology at the University of Melbourne, the Well-Being Institute at the University of Cambridge, and the Optentia Research Programme in South Africa.
Moreover, the work of such researchers and practitioners, as they attend to big and small suffering, has overwhelmingly concentrated on persons who provide help rather than persons who receive it. Comparatively little has been devoted to the effect of aid on recipients (for an exception, see Nadler, 2015). It is often assumed that helping is constructive and beneficial and that these beneficiaries of aid are grateful for the help received (Fisher, DePaulo, & Nadler, 1981; Zarri, 2013). These social scientists have identified a host of ways in which charitable behavior can lead to benefits for the giver, whether economically via tax breaks (Clotfelter, 1997), socially via signaling one’s wealth or status (Glazer & Konrad 1996) or psychologically via experiencing well-being from helping (Andreoni, 1990; Dunn, Aknin, & Norton, 2008; Grant, 2013; Post, 2011). Similarly, researchers have also examined the costs (e.g., compassion fatigue and burnout) of helping and caring on aid givers who assist the needy and the traumatized (Figley, 1995; Flynn, 2003).
This focus has obscured the prevalence of problematic effects of such prosocial factors on aid receivers. This is because oftentimes such programs are designed and implemented with little awareness that helping may hurt (Corbett & Fikkert, 2014); that is, well-meaning initiatives wind up hurting the parties they were designed to help. Unintended consequences are usually (but not always or necessarily) negative and were elevated by Levitt and Dubner (2009) to the status of a law (“… one of the most powerful laws in the universe …”, p. XIV) because of their pervasiveness. One unintended consequence can cause other unintended consequences resulting in significant harm in the long term in a number of ways.
With respect to aid, many such efforts have undoubtedly been motivated, in part, by noble intentions and a sincere desire to help those thought to be disadvantaged. Nevertheless, offering aid can sometimes generate seriously negative effects in recipients including loss of self-reliance, increased levels of dependence, feelings of discomfort and obligation, decrements in self-esteem and social status, a sense of entitlement, and derogations of the helper and the help (Fisher et al., 1981). Like in the story of the boy and the cocoon, sometimes providing aid, even with the best of intentions, can be problematic and thus an analysis of the negative side of helping is addressed in this paper. Unfortunately, many individuals find it difficult to question the merits of any given proposal offered in good faith and thus often costs and other negative unexpected consequences are not anticipated and addressed.
All too often the best long-term action to help others is not immediately or intuitively obvious; not what temporarily makes people feel good; or not what is being promoted by others with their own potentially self-serving agendas. Indeed, beneficial care may sometimes be cruel or harmful, the equivalent of saying “no” to the student who demands a higher, undeserved grade, or to the addict who wants another hit. Was Paul, the Apostle in early Christian history, unusually callous in admonishing early Christians about idleness when he said, “… The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10, New International Version)? St. Paul was concerned, according to a recent interpretation by Pope Francis, with the “false spiritualism of some who live off the backs of their brothers and sisters without doing anything” (Harris, 2015). The issue is not refusing to give aid to those who cannot help themselves or people who do not have the physical ability to earn; the problem is exclusively living off the graciousness and generosity of others.
Hidden Costs of Helping
In some cases, rather than having benign effects, attempts to help others may come with very real (but often hidden) costs that can worsen the very realities that were meant to be alleviated. Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman (1975) warned of such harms when he said that “there is no such thing as a free lunch” (p. 1) because someone, somewhere always pays and that there are always costs involved. The first reference to this idea originated in 19th century U.S. saloons whereby free lunches were offered to customers who purchased at least one drink. The foods, being high in salt, would entice customers to consume more drink, usually beer. As such, the “free lunch” carried a hidden cost to the recipients of the meal, namely, the price paid for each extra unit of drink, which effectively ended up paying for the lunch. Marketers know that the offer of a free sample can lead to a larger purchase that more than compensates for the cost of their “initial” gift (Martin, Goldstein, & Cialdini, 2014).
Receiving a “free lunch” from the government also has a hidden cost as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a lifelong New Deal liberal, former New York Senator, and accomplished social scientist indicated: “the issue of welfare is not what it costs those who provide it but what it costs those who receive it” (as cited in Pivin & Cloward, 1979, p. 340). The point was that welfare often exacts a very high price because it robs aid recipients of their self-worth and self-reliance, key American, even human, values, and makes them dependent and entitled (Halvorsen, 1998).
Receiving benefits and advantages unrelated to an individual’s behavior, performance, or accomplishment often leads to them becoming labeled with two pejorative terms 1) dependent—an unhealthy reliance on someone or something else for aid or support sometimes seen as “a defect of individual character” (Goodin, 1988, p. 89) that takes away the freedom of personal initiative (Adriaansens, 1994), and promotes feelings of indebtedness, incompetency, and negative affect (Buunk, Doosje, Jans, & Hopstaken, 1993); and 2) entitled—a pernicious and unfounded belief that one possesses a legitimate right to receive special privileges, mode of treatment, and/or designation (Kerr, 1985). According to researchers (e.g., Campbell, Bonacci, Shelton, Exline, & Bushman, 2004; Snyders, 2002) persons with high perceived entitlement and deservedness levels believe that they are owed many things in life where they do not have to earn what they get, and regardless of performance levels. These individuals often develop a sense of privilege because they have received unearned benefits due to the groups they belong to (e.g., because of their gender or the color of their skin) rather than because of anything they have done (Johnson, 2006). In the work context, employees with entitlement beliefs display a tendency toward unethical behavior and conflict with their supervisors, unrealistic pay expectations, low levels of job satisfaction, high levels of turnover intention, perceived inequity, job dissatisfaction, and even corruption (Kets de Vries, 2006; Levine, 2005). At extremely high levels entitlement often is associated with narcissism (Ackerman & Donnellen, 2013)—a decidedly negative trait. Thus, a “free lunch” can be damaging—and even reflecting about a free lunch can be problematic.