Talk about love as a topic of scientific research and you’ll likely get the same reaction that Jen Shang does. ‘People tend to think of it as being too warm and fluffy for science, yet ‘love’ is a concept that people use all the time in their daily experience, especially when we give,’ says the London-based psychologist. ‘Sadly psychology tends to be problem-focused in its mindset, because that’s where the funding is. It’s hard to get funding to think about what it means to love as part of a fulfilling life’.
To be clear, Shang isn’t thinking about romantic love ‘or the kind one feel for one’s family or pet,’ she adds – that is widely studied in psychology; but more the compassionate love of humankind: the kind that, at its best, helps society more broadly tick over smoothly.
The Ancient Greeks also drew the distinction, between ‘eros’ – passionate love between two people – and ‘agape’, a selfless love extended to everyone, which they considered the highest form of love. What, Shang has wondered, is it about the way this kind of love is expressed, and how it is felt in the person expressing it, that we need to better understand?
The Radical Idea That Giving Should Feel Good
That question has been parlayed to practical ends too: as the world’s first professor of philanthropic psychology – a fledging branch of psychology – she’s also co-founder of the Institute of Sustainable Philanthropy, which, alongside academic research, advises fund-raising organisations on how better to speak to donors using, as it were, the language of love in order to increase donations.
The institute’s studies suggest that just by tilting their pitch away from messages of doom and gloom towards something that is so rarely acknowledged – that giving is an expression of love – fund-raisers can double their charitable receipts
And considerably so too: the institute’s studies suggest that just by tilting their pitch away from messages of doom and gloom – the severity and urgency of the problem is front and centre in much fund-raising communications – towards something that is so rarely acknowledged – that giving money (or time, or effort, or attention) is an expression of, yes, love – fund-raisers can double their charitable receipts over some three years.
Are You Suffering From Compassion Fatigue? It’s a tilt away from the negative to the positive. Neuroscience studies even suggest that when we shock people into distress, they’re less, not more, likely to help others because in that critical moment they shift attention to protecting their own well-being.
Indeed, Shang stresses, the intention isn’t to teach fund-raisers how to ‘nudge’ behaviour by some nefarious marketing means. It’s about – and this can but sound rather hippyish again – sharing the love, recognising how actions and interactions make people feel and how these can be more meaningful for all involved. After all, the very word ‘philanthropy’ comes from ‘philos’ – love – and ‘anthropos’ – meaning humanity.
‘For some charitable organisations their efforts are not just about raising money, of course, but about growing love – about growing what one might feel towards people who are experiencing homelessness, for example, regardless of whether any money is given,’ Shang explains. ‘Increasing love, in other words, is an end in itself, which sounds such an obvious, even absurd, thing to say: that we need to love each other more. That idea can be experienced in ways that have nothing to do with supporting charities or raising money. It may be as simple as the effect of smiling to strangers more often’.
At the root of Shang’s research is the study of identity – the sense of who we each are, which may be highly individualistic or more part of a collective like a family or organisation – and how nurturing that identity shapes our outward expression of love to humanity at large. That, she says, is typically different in obvious ways – between men and women, for example – but also in more subtle ways, depending on the culture in which we’re raised, for instance.
Much of this appears to be hard-wired. ‘You can’t suddenly make someone who has grown up thinking that giving is a moral imperative switch to simply thinking that giving is fun – the way they think about expressing love for others is part of who they are,’ Shang says. Nonetheless our understanding can be more finely-tuned, she argues. She’s working on building ‘a fundraising taxonomy of love’, a systematic classification for the way compassionate love is felt and expressed. That’s some task ahead of her.
‘But the better we understand the sense of [compassionate] love, the more possible it will be to make a sustainable increase our psychological well-being,’ she argues. It would also further help fund-raising too, especially perhaps in the face of so-called compassion fatigue: that sense of wanting to retreat into a state of complete avoidance in the face of so many demands on our fellow-feeling. ‘If this science can mature we’ll be better able to find an approach that allows us to sustain strategies to keep giving in the presence of over-whelming requests. And that would be a very good thing,’ she says.
Rethinking Why We Give
That approach might also give us a bit of a break in another way too. Shang notes how there is this disconnect between charitable giving – or any expression of love for humankind – and a readiness to feel good about ourselves for that giving. There’s an embarrassment, or a sense of guilt in it all. For decades giving has been co-opted by self-sacrificial ideas of altruism, rather the recognising that – in making a charitable donation, for example – you’re not giving away part of yourself, but moving a resource to another part of who you are. It’s a celebration of self.
‘My opinion is that humanity still has to grow up to the point where doing good doesn’t have to somehow equate to feeling bad,’ she explains. ‘Not enough good is shared as part of the social norms we have now to make feeling good as a result of good deeds acceptable, especially in the face of so much suffering. That’s something society has to work on’.
Philanthropic psychology would certainly help here, if, Shang says again, this new scientific discipline can take off over the coming years. ‘I’m not sure that it will though,’ she laments. ‘To study how people can love to their fullest while feeling their best simply doesn’t sound [to many] like a problem that is serious, complex or urgent enough’. But, really, what topic is more serious, complex or urgent?
