The Warm Fuzzies
“…you like me. Right now, you like me.” – Sally Field
Very little whimsy makes it into economics journals, so any at all is a little treasure when you find it. Given that fact, if I had to give an award for best title of a paper in economics, it would go to Jim Andreoni1 for his paper entitled “Warm-glow versus cold-prickle.”
Warm glow, according to Andreoni, is the feeling you get when you do something nice for others. In this post, I consider a close cousin of warm glow—the feeling you get when someone thanks you for doing something nice—which I’m going to call the warm fuzzies. There’s the doing, which glows, and the thanks-getting, which is fuzzy.
What are the warm fuzzies? What is being measured and what is being motivated?
With Fuzzy Gratitude
Everyone has a story about a time someone thanked them effusively, likely because it gives them a chance to talk about something generous or kind that they did. For academics, it’s often notes like this one, sent to me in April of 2016 by a student who was graduating—a special moment for her indeed:
This student stands out because she faced especially difficult personal challenges, so I was particularly moved to receive this heartfelt message. So warm, so fuzzy.
But why? The explanation lies in the Sally Field quote, but it’s worth carefully working through the logic.
To get at warm fuzzies, I think it’s vital to distinguish between these two subtly different sorts of feelings.
The feeling you get when you help a friend, because you helped them, even if they don’t know it was you. This is the warm glow of helping, in itself.
The feeling you get when you help a friend and they are grateful that you did so. This is the warm fuzzy of your help being acknowledged.
Now it might seem like (1) and (2) are hopelessly bound up together. After all, people usually know where help has come from, and they are usually grateful for it. But (1) and (2) can be teased apart. For example, I have been reading The Count of Monte Cristo recently—it somehow escaped me when I was in high school—and several plot lines illustrate (1) without (2). [SPOILERS]
Take Monsieur Morrel, the shipowner who employed Dantès—our hero and future Count of Monte Cristo—before his imprisonment. After Dantès' arrest, Morrel tries, but fails, to get Dantès out of prison. Years later, when Morrel faces bankruptcy, Dantès anonymously provides the money to save his honor and his shipping business. To add the cherry on top, Dantès also saves Morrel's son, Maximilian, from despair and reunites him with his love, Valentine. It's a moving sequence in the novel where Dantès uses his wealth and power to repay the kindness Morrel showed him in the past. The recipients (initially, at least) were none the wiser about the source.
Along similar lines, Valentine, the daughter of Villefort (one of the men responsible for Dantès' imprisonment), finds herself in danger from her own family. The Count becomes aware of a plot against her life and intervenes. He uses his knowledge of drugs and poisons to make it appear as though she has died, thus saving her from the real threat. This act not only protects Valentine but also helps Maximilian Morrel, who, as we have seen, loves her deeply.
Eventually those he helps learn his identity and Dantès nonetheless is pleased—very pleased, indeed, as is the reader, in my experience—seeing these characters on the path to happiness. This pleasure that Dantès takes is pure warm glow, the feeling from helping, rather than from the gratitude.
Ok, with that preamble, here’s the short version of why we experience warm fuzzies: it is fitness-good for you if other people think you like them. From your point of view, everyone out in the world wants to help you, harm you, or is indifferent to you. If you have to choose who to help, you’re going to pick the people who like you; after all, it’s good for you if your supporters are thriving. That means that it’s in others’ interests to persuade you that they like you. And doing something that elicits your gratitude is typically exactly such a way.
It can be hard to keep all these things straight. Another way to think about this is to label everyone out in the world as an ally, enemy, or neutral. Now, imagine you’re the king—we get to King Lear in a moment—with great munificence to dispense. Everyone knows that you’ll favor the people who think of you, the King, as someone they would like to help—an ally—as opposed to someone they want to hurt—an enemy. Why would you want to help people who think you an enemy? Therefore, everyone wants you to think that they consider you a friend/ally. This is one reason it’s good to be the king: everyone wants to do things that show they like you.
It goes beyond that. When people get married, there is sometimes friction about who will be named the Best Man or the Maid of Honor. Why? Because being named the Best Man—the clue is in the name—indicates that the person selected is at the very top of the groom’s list of friends. Holding aside blood relatives—often chosen as Best Man in part to avoid having to make visible one’s best friend2—being named Best Man tells the person, and everyone else, who the groom likes most.
And why do ranks matter? Aha. Well, humans care a great deal about where they rank because friends are allies who choose sides when conflicts emerge.3 Let’s assume that when fights break out, people side with the person who is highest up in their friendship queue: they choose their best friend against all other friends, their 2nd best friend against all except the best friend, and so on. This is, in fact, more or less what it means to have a friendship rank and is in essence how things work out in the context of international relations. If a fight were to break out between, say, the U.K. and another U.S. ally, such as Morocco, there is little doubt which side the U.S. would back. The U.K. is our best friend—we have a “special relationship”—at the top of our ally queue.
Being high in others’ friendship queue is, then, a valuable resource. High placement means that in the event of conflict, you’ll have that individuals’ backing. Being high in many people’s friend queues—being popular—is experienced as rewarding for this reason. It is fitness-good because you can count on the support of allies when fights emerge.
How do people decide who to put where in their friendship queue? There isn’t a ton of work on friendship ranking, but in past work, some colleagues and I provided evidence for the importance of friend rankings in an analysis of over 10 million friendship decisions on the social network MySpace. MySpace allowed users to rank their top friends, enabling us to test predictions about how people prioritize their closest relationships. We found that the ranking an individual gave to another person was by far the strongest predictor of whether that person was listed as their #1 best friend, much more so than factors one might have expected, including age, gender, geography, popularity, and so on. This result held even after controlling for those other variables. Relative rank was the primary driver of real-world best friend selection. What this means is that if someone raises their estimate of where they are in your friendship queue, that’s likely to raise where you are in theirs. So, again, it’s good for you if other people think you like them (even if you secretly don’t).
“Thanks, Friend”
Ok, let’s add one more idea.
Among your friends, there are some who would give you their kidney if you needed it and some who might not even take a few seconds to fire off a supportive text if your life imploded.4 You can therefore think of all of your friends as having—at least implicitly—some ratio of benefits-to-you and cost-to-them.5 Some are willing to endure huge costs to help you—these are your good friends—and others are willing to help you but only if the benefit to you is great and the cost to them is small. These are more distant friends, or even not friends at all.
Now, here is the thing. Each time you do something nice for someone, you are communicating to them something about this ratio. You are, in essence, saying, “I am willing to pay this big a cost to help you that much.”
This is a very valuable thing for that person to know. They are learning how much you value them, which tells them how much you’ll help them in the future. Acts of kindness don’t just help others, they signal information to others.6 (This is why many people might rather have, say, a scavenger hunt meticulously planned by their partner for their birthday than a new iPad. The care put into the scavenger hunt shows the time and effort that one was willing to put in, the cost side of the ratio. Being willing to put in a large cost for a relatively small benefit to you means they care about you a lot.)
Now we can see even more clearly the difference between warm glow and warm fuzzy. It’s good to help your friends, just for the sake of helping them. If you help someone who values you, great! If you get a close friend past a hurdle, great! Helping your friend succeed indirectly benefits you, because part of their success will be channeled toward you: increasing their power and status, for example, enables them to provide greater benefits to you in the future. That’s the warm glow.7 And, indeed, research suggests that you get a warmer glow—“higher levels of positive affect”—when it comes to helping relatives and close friends compared to more distant social connections, which resonates with the analysis presented here.8
But there is also the signal you sent, beyond the act itself.
When you hear “thank you,” the person is saying: I recognize that you just paid a cost to benefit me and I am updating my beliefs about 1) where I am in your friendship queue and 2) the ratio of benefits/costs you need to choose to help me. In short, they are Sally Field. They are saying (right now) you like me, you really like me. This is a Big Deal. To the extent you are valuable to others, they are likely to work for your continued well-being and prosperity.
And now, happily, we also have an answer to the question of why King Lear was so pissed off at Cordelia, as I promised above. Asking someone to express their emphatic, ebullient gratitude might be petty for a king, but this view makes plain why hearing relatively muted thanks is irritating. Gratitude tells the recipient they are valued. Hearing insufficient gratitude, well… of such things, five-act tragedies are made.
Sincere Gratitude?
Ok, let’s return briefly to a problem with these sorts of signaling arguments that are typically raised by economists: cheap talk. Just because someone says that they are grateful doesn’t mean that they actually believe that the person they are thanking values them in turn. It could be that they are trying to persuade you that they value you but they secretly don’t value you at all, or even hate you.
This is possible, but… why? What would the advantage of insincere gratitude be? Gonoril and Regan provide one sort of answer: to win the favor of the target, one who has a kingdom to divide. Kingdoms to divide are likely rare, but, sure, possible. This predicts insincere gratitude when there are great benefits to be extracted, and thus we have sycophants. This strategy must be balanced against the reputational costs of lying, if one’s overly generous thanks come to be known to be insincere. Exaggerating gratitude could also plausibly lull someone into a false sense of security so they lower their defenses, making a sneak attack possible. However, it seems hard to credit that any but the most sinister would stoop to such things. In short, sure, gratitude can be cheap talk, but in most cases, gratitude seems likely to be sincere. (If it weren’t, we would always ignore it). The benefits of insincere gratitude seem restricted to peculiar circumstances.
So, finally, what is the warm fuzzy measuring? It’s measuring how much someone else thinks you value them. That sounds like a bank shot, but, remember, that feeling of reward is evolution’s way of telling you that someone just raised their opinion of your opinion of them and, because of the logic sketched above, this is good for you.
There might also be a secondary signal being sent: the degree to which you value people in general—i.e. how nice you are. If you’re always willing to help a friend in need, then other people will be eager to become your friend, in case they’re ever in need. If you’re powerfully moved to help someone close to you, you might also be moved, albeit less powerfully, to help someone more distant from you. Good deeds not only improve your relationship with the person you’re helping, they also improve your reputation as a virtuous person. This benefit is important in a nosy species like ours, which gossips9 frequently about other’s character.
So what is the warm fuzzy motivating? Altruism.10 That rewarding sensation is saying, hey, that belief the other person has that you like them and will help them (and that you’re a helpful person in general), that’s good for you, so whatever you did to earn it, do that again.
When other people think you like them, that’s good, so go ahead and feel all fuzzy about it. Indeed, the words of the student I mentioned had a profound effect on me, and I will carry my feelings about her with me, I am morally certain, to my dying day.
REFERENCES
Andreoni, J. (1995). Warm-glow versus cold-prickle: the effects of positive and negative framing on cooperation in experiments. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 110(1), 1-21.
B., Dunn E. W., Whillans A. V. (2022). The emotional rewards of prosocial spending are robust and replicable in large samples. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 31(6), 536–545
Aknin L. B., Sandstrom G. M., Dunn E. W., Norton M. I. (2011). It’s the recipient that counts: Spending money on strong social ties leads to greater happiness than spending on weak social ties. PLOS ONE, 6(2), Article e17018
De Backer, C. J., Nelissen, M., Vyncke, P., Braeckman, J., & McAndrew, F. T. (2007). Celebrities: From teachers to friends: A test of two hypotheses on the adaptiveness of celebrity gossip. Human Nature, 18, 334-354.
Cosmides, L., Barrett, H. C., & Tooby, J. (2010). Adaptive specializations, social exchange, and the evolution of human intelligence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(supplement_2), 9007-9014.
DeScioli, P., & Kurzban, R. (2009). The alliance hypothesis for human friendship. PloS one, 4(6), e5802.
DeScioli, P., & Kurzban, R. (2012). The company you keep: Friendship decisions from a functional perspective. Social judgment and decision making, 209-225.
DeScioli, P., Kurzban, R., Koch, E. N., & Liben-Nowell, D. (2011). Best friends: Alliances, friend ranking, and the MySpace social network. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(1), 6-8.
McCullough, M. E., Kurzban, R., & Tabak, B. A. (2013). Cognitive systems for revenge and forgiveness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(1), 1-15.
Sznycer, D., Delton, A. W., Robertson, T. E., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (2019). The ecological rationality of helping others: Potential helpers integrate cues of recipients' need and willingness to sacrifice. Evolution and Human Behavior, 40(1), 34-45.
Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1996). Friendship and the banker's paradox: Other pathways to the evolution of adaptations for altruism. In W. G. Runciman, J. M. Smith, & R. I. M. Dunbar (Eds.), Evolution of social behaviour patterns in primates and man (pp. 119–143). Oxford University Press.
Tooby, J., Cosmides, L., Sell, A., Lieberman, D., & Sznycer, D. (2008). Internal regulatory variables and the design of human motivation: A computational and evolutionary approach. Handbook of approach and avoidance motivation, 15, 251.
Disclosure. I used to know Jim back in the day. I also have a bias. I have played “credit card roulette”—where the server at a restaurant randomly chooses one credit card from all those provided by the people at the table—exactly once in my life, and Jim lost, saving me from paying the full cost of the dinner for everyone, which at the time would have been about half my monthly income.
DeScioli et al., 2011.
These ideas were developed in concert with Peter DeScioli. We discuss them in more detail in DeScioli & Kurzban 2009, 2012, and DeScioli et al., 2011
Cosmides, Barrett, & Tooby, 2010.
Tooby et al., 2008.
Sznycer et al., 2019.
The finding that spending money on other people makes the spender happy seems to be one of those rare findings that might survive the replication crisis (Aknin, Dunn, & Whillans, 2022).
Aknin et al., 2011. People get warm glows/fuzzies from helping strangers. My sense is that this is an artifact of the fact that in ancestral environments, everyone you met—or their relatives—might have been able to help you down the line, so that warm fuzzy is the potential for reciprocal benefits or even an eventual friendship.
See, for instance, the work by Charlotte DeBacker and colleagues, e.g., De Backer et al., 2007.
There is perennial debate about altruism. A post on this topic is in the works. Watch this space!