An example of the dangers of helping in China from the article that ChristianKl talked about.
While individualism in China is a big thing, this situation is more related to the fear of being accused as the responsible of the accident, even when you just tried to help.
The most popular case happened in the city of Nanjing, a city located at the west of Shanghai. The year was 2006 when Xu Shoulan, an old lady trying to get out of a bus, fell and broke her femur. Peng Yu, was passing by and helped her taking her to the hospital and giving her ¥200 (~30 USD) to pay for her treatment. After the first diagnosis Xu needed a femur replacement surgery, but she refused to pay it by herself so she demanded Peng to pay for it, as he was the responsible of the accident according to her. She sued him and after six months she won and Peng needed to cover all the medical expenses of the old lady. The court stated that “no one would, in good conscience, help someone unless they felt guilty”.
While this incident wasn’t the first, it was very popular and it showed one of the non written rules of China. [I bolded this] If you help someone it’s because you feel guilty of what happened, so in some way you were or are involved in the accident or incident.
I don’t know enough about the situation to guess why this norm exists. Or even if it actually exists. But if so, it seems like a bad equillibrium.
Historically, the problem seems to be that most Communist government initiatives to get people to be more altruistic result in them LARPing and not being more altruistic.
At the moment the Chinese government solution seems to be: “Give everybody social credit scores that measure how altruistic they are and hopefully that will get everyone to be more altruistic”.
I don’t get how larping altruism results in the norm that “if you’re helping, you’re guilty”. Unless people went out of their way to cause problems and act like saviors to seem altruistic? Which might be possible, but also sounds like it would be difficult to execute and isn’t the only way people could goodhart altruism metrics.
An example of the dangers of helping in China from the article that ChristianKl talked about.
I don’t know enough about the situation to guess why this norm exists. Or even if it actually exists. But if so, it seems like a bad equillibrium.
Historically, the problem seems to be that most Communist government initiatives to get people to be more altruistic result in them LARPing and not being more altruistic.
At the moment the Chinese government solution seems to be: “Give everybody social credit scores that measure how altruistic they are and hopefully that will get everyone to be more altruistic”.
I don’t get how larping altruism results in the norm that “if you’re helping, you’re guilty”. Unless people went out of their way to cause problems and act like saviors to seem altruistic? Which might be possible, but also sounds like it would be difficult to execute and isn’t the only way people could goodhart altruism metrics.
If most altruism is larping then for someone who does something altruistic, people who do altruistic things become suspect.
If I remember right there are cases where in former communist countries people who always vote cooperate on the ultimatum game get punished for it.
Communism isn’t the only factor here but I would expect that it’s one meaningful factor.