The Weight of Small Altruistic Actions

Link post

Note: This is a linkpost for @Joey’s post “Altruism sharpens altruism” where I summarize and embed some of my quick takes on the weight and overall positive impact that small altruistic actions can have. Feel free to share what stood out to you from the original post.

Within the EA community, there is a strong focus, as I am aware of, on pursuing careers aligning with EA values or working towards a larger-scale altruistic project. Although I completely agree with the impact that such larger-scale actions have, I feel as if this post had highlighted the undeniable benefit that small-scale altruistic efforts and actions can have. The post particularly focused on how smaller altruistic actions can reinforce overall altruistic behaviors amongst individuals, lead to habit development, have ripple effects across other sectors in our lives, and challenge the idea that only large-scale altruistic actions are impactful. Through this linkpost, I focus on summarizing what I feel stood out to me, which particularly entails the role of smaller altruistic actions in the development of our habits, and how these actions can cross-apply to other areas.

Role in Habit and Personality Development

The post outlined that valuing and practicing small-scale altruism can develop the habit of being altruistic. Dedicating ourselves to smaller altruistic actions, especially consistently, enables us to nurture this habit, similar to how a personality trait is reinforced. For example, regularly being kind to everyone you interact with strengthens the trait of kindness, or committing to courageous choices strengthens the trait of bravery and courage. Likewise, practicing even small altruistic actions reinforces the trait of altruism and helps to both develop it further as well as let it be embedded across other areas in your life.

As these altruistic actions become ingrained in who we are, I feel as if they would intrinsically encourage us to continue embodying and being altruistic as they slowly evolve into a part of our identity. Therefore, one of my main takeaways from the post is that small altruistic actions that subsequently form altruistic habits lead us to act more altruistically over time, as they gradually become part of our identity.

Application to Other Areas

One way to imagine altruism is much like other personality characteristics; being conscientious in one area flows over to other areas, working fast in one area heightens your ability to work faster in others. If you tidy your room, it does not make you less likely to be organized in your Google Docs. Even though the same willpower concern applies in these situations and of course, there are limits to how much you can push yourself in a given day, the overall habits build and cross-apply to other areas instead of being seen as in competition. I think altruism is also habit-forming and ends up cross-applying.

I would say a concern with acknowledging the weight of smaller-scale actions would be that it can distract the focus from larger ones. However, I do feel that the post highlighted how instead of smaller altruistic actions taking away from contributing to something larger and potentially more impactful, they can rather create a positive ripple effect on other areas.

Essentially, each of these smaller altruistic actions can affect our behavior positively and allow us to redirect the altruism to other sectors of our lives. The smaller altruistic habits cultivated may also allow us to build skills like empathy, which again can be applied across other areas—underscoring just how subtly important these smaller actions can be. This challenged the idea that only large-scale altruistic actions are genuinely impactful.

Conclusion

Overall, the weight that small altruistic actions have was emphasized in the original post—helping me to appreciate these smaller actions and encouraging me to search for ways in which I can personally contribute. There was a great list outlined in the original post, written by Joey, which I have pasted below in case you wanted a quick reference to it.

Donating 10% (even of a lower salary/earnings level)
Being Vegan
Non-life-threatening donations (e.g., blood donations, bone marrow donations)
Spending less to donate more
Working more hours at an altruistic job
Becoming an organ donor
Asking for donations during some birthdays/celebrations.
Getting your friends and family birthday cards / doing locally altruistic actions
Not violating common sense morality (e.g., don’t lie, steal) on a whim or precarious reason.