Addressing Free Riders

To continue the discussion from the last post...excerpts from a book in development. The working title today is Positively Generous: Christian Stewardship for Actual Human Beings.

So are the free riders dishonest? Are they stealing from the rest of us? For the most part, I don’t think that’s what they intend. We experience “taking” as different from “keeping.” When we take from someone else, we deprive the other of something they already had. When we keep our stuff and don’t share, we aren’t creating a perception of loss for the other person. Nor are we creating a perception of gain for ourselves. When we keep rather than give, we don’t experience that as a change in the status of anything. And yet, if we are a part of a system that depends on giving, our keeping is in fact a kind of taking.

Psychologists remind us that we are far more sensitive to potential loss than we are to potential gain. They call this our tendency toward “loss aversion.” I think that we apply the same sensitivity to our lack of giving. Since we aren’t creating an actual and active loss for anyone, we haven’t really done anything objectionable. And since we are less sensitive to potential gain—for ourselves or for anyone else—we aren’t all that worried when we keep our money, our talent, our energy, and our time for ourselves. It isn’t just that we have insufficient information to penalize passive takers. In fact, we’re not clear that there’s anything particularly wrong with such passive taking (better known as “keeping”).

So what can we do about this problem in church giving? Ariely describes an experiment where participants were given an opportunity to cheat in order to gain a cash reward. In the control group, they had no such opportunity. In one test group, they were primed to remember ten books they read in high school. They raised their score on average by about a third through cheating. In the other test group, the members were primed to recall the Ten Commandments. Please note that none of the commandments was identified or stated. In this test group, there was no cheating at all. Ariely concludes that it was the simple remembrance of some sort of “moral benchmark” that produced the difference.[1]

In another experiment, Ariely and colleagues created a situation where a planted confederate simply raised the question about cheating. At a predetermined point in a testing session, the confederate (a professional actor) asked the test administrator, “So, is it okay to cheat?” The administrator replied, “You can do whatever you want.” This exchange made it clear that there would be no penalty applied for cheating. If the process had been driven by a rational cost-benefit analysis, this little conversation should have increased the level of cheating. In fact, the introduction of the question about cheating reduced the actual incidence of cheating even though it was clear that no one would suffer any consequences for the bad behavior.[2]

In the language of behavioral economics, the experiment increased the “salience” of cheating behavior. That is, the mention of this possibility brought it to mind and made it a factor in the behavior of the test subjects. The mere mention of cheating did not eliminate the bad behavior, but it is did reduce it significantly.

So I have to wonder if the mere mention periodically of the Free Rider Problem in churches would make some impact on the giving behavior of members of congregations. Based on the evidence we have, I believe such mentions would make a difference. It is important to remember, however, that the power of such a mention appears directly related to its proximity to the behavior. I’m not advocating that prior to every church offering we might mention that some folks don’t give anything even though they could. So we need to test out ways to inject this information into our church conversations effectively but without inducing insurrection.

In church we tend to talk about giving less than anything else. We certainly talk about sex more than we discuss money. We even hazard conversations about politics rather than to discuss our giving. So people are left in the dark as to any moral benchmarks that might help them to deal with their passive taking. Could it be that simple awareness-raising on a regular and repeated basis could alter the passive taking habits of some of our free riders? I think it’s worth exploring further.

This information may allow us to relax a little bit as pastors in our frantic search for the "perfect" stewardship approach. The particular method or strategy may not matter nearly as much as we think it does. Instead, any approach that makes giving or not giving salient, for example, is likely to have a constructive impact on the giving of at least some of the members and participants.

---

[1] Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational, page 285.

[2] See Gino, Ayal, and Ariely, http://people.duke.edu/~dandan/Papers/Cheating/contagion.pdf., page 5.