Why You Should Be Public About Your Good Deeds

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Why You Should Be Public About Your Good Deeds

When I first started donating, I did so anonymously. My default baseline is to be humble and avoid showing off. I didn’t want others around me to think that I have a stuffed head and hold too high an opinion of myself. I also didn’t want them to judge my giving decisions, as some may have judged them negatively. I wish I knew back then that I could have done much more good by publicizing my donations and other goods deeds, such as by signing up first for The Life You Can Save pledge to donate at least 1% of my annual income to effective charities, and then the Giving What We Canpledge to donate 10% of my income. Why did I change my mind about being public? Let me share a bit of my background to give you the appropriate context. As long as I could remember myself, I was always interested about analyzing how and why individuals and groups evaluated their environment and made their decisions to reach their goals – rational thinking. This topic became the focus of my research as a tenure-track professor at Ohio State in the history of science, studying the intersection of psychology, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral economics, and other fields. While most of my colleagues focused on research, I was just as passionate about sharing my knowledge with others, focusing my efforts on high-


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Why You Should Be Public About Your Good Deeds by Intentional Insights - Issuu