Evidence suggests that social distancing will make the COVID-19 pandemic less severe. But distancing and other similar behavioral changes, which often entail significant personal costs, may also be advantageous in ways not widely appreciated. In this thread I’ll describe one. 1/
Most of those helped by your efforts at social distancing will of course never know that you helped them. But helping them may nonetheless benefit you in ways quite apart from reducing your odds of becoming infected by a virus that could kill you. 2/
As Aristotle emphasized, habits are important. We become what we repeatedly do. Incurring personal costs to assist others subtly changes who you are. It reinforces your identity as the kind of person others can count on. If others could somehow sense that change in you… 3/
…they would become more likely to seek you out for interactions that require trust. That’s to your benefit. Of course, if your principal motive for helping others anonymously was the prospect of benefiting in that way, you may not be such a trustworthy person after all! 4/
Yet surely it would be a good thing if we realized that helping others anonymously might be less costly than commonly supposed. How might such behavior cause others to perceive you as more trustworthy? A simple thought experiment suggests a possible answer. 5/
Imagine that you’ve just returned from a crowded concert to discover that you’d lost an envelope containing $10k in cash. That sound you remember hearing as you rose from your seat must have been the envelope falling from your coat pocket onto the floor. 6/
Can you think of anyone you feel sure would return your envelope if he or she found it? Most people say yes. But what makes them so confident? It’s can’t be that this person had returned lost envelopes full of cash to them in the past. 7/
Most say they know the person well enough to feel sure that she wouldn’t have even considered keeping the cash. Experimental evidence also suggests that people are surprisingly accurate in their predictions of who will cheat in games in which cheating cannot be detected. 8/
A trustworthy person is someone who does the right thing even when no one is looking. Aristotle suggested that we become trustworthy by force of habit. At first, we refrain from cheating because we fear of being caught and punished. 9/
But over time, honesty becomes part of our identity. When a golden opportunity to cheat then presents itself, we refrain because we don’t WANT to cheat. 10/
So if people have ways of knowing what kind of people we are, taking anonymous steps to help others may be less costly than might appear. If you’re already a decent person, helping others feels good, yes. But helping others will also make you into an even better person. 11/
That would of course boost the psychological rewards from helping others. But it might also result in more tangible rewards. Even if not, though, we should still make every effort to keep our distance. 12/
