The Charitable Self
Back in the summer, a national fundraiser began known as the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. In this challenge, a person on Facebook was nominated by their friend to either drop a bucket of ice water on their head, donate money to the ALS Foundation, or do both (under the time constraint of 24 hours). After completing and posting a video of their challenge, the person would then choose five friends to nominate, and the challenge would continue. This is, of course, a case of the directed graph. Since you can’t nominate friends who have already completed the challenge, you are forced to created a directed edge to five friends who have yet to commit to the cause. For each five people you nominate, they essentially nominate five, each who nominate five more, thus increasing the number of nodes exponentially. It’s easy to understand how the challenge became a national trend, since the entire facebook graph is connected, mostly everyone will be nominated. While many students have pointed this out earlier in the class, many have not taken into consideration our recent understanding of cascades and direct-benefit.
Ian McGugan writes about the challenge, declaring that “Its public nature forced people to either accept the task or suffer damage to their reputations. Other stimulants to action included peer pressure from friends, the ‘helper’s high’ that results from aiding others and the fortuitous participation of celebrities like Bill Gates and Katy Perry.” If one was nominated by a friend on social media (both their friend’s friends and their own friends would see this nomination), they could easily see a result of direct benefit. If they complete the challenge, they win the respect of their combined friends. If not, they lose it. By publicly challenging each person, it’s harder to refuse.
Now, if we imagine that you hadn’t been keeping up on facebook, and one day you randomly get nominated for this challenge (without having seen it before), one would probably not complete it. It’s the same as getting asked for money at a store, or in the street. You’d see it as an everyday request, and usually ignore it. Why this didn’t happen with the Ice Bucket Challenge was because of it’s cascade-like nature. When you were challenged, you would be able to see who nominated you. You could then go back and see who they were nominated by and so forth. Essentially, you have a giant line of people behind you making a choice of either accepting the challenge, or refusing it. Since all the people behind you accepted it, it becomes a giant cascade of charitable action. Refusing to complete the challenge would be contradictory to the entire system, and was very uncommon. Once someone did refuse, however, this led to other people refusing, and that’s how the challenge ultimately ended (by this time, its popularity had also decreased). Looking at it like a cascade, you could even guess what each person who accepted the challenge did (either pouring the ice bucket over the head, donating money, or both). If a long string of people who just poured the ice bucket over their heads (for example, a group of fifth graders, who don’t have any money of their own), the next person in their line would probably do the same. If the line did both the challenge and payed money, then the next person in their line would do the same too, considering the cascade-like nature and peer-pressure of the system (i.e. if one person didn’t really want to pour the ice bucket over their head, but everybody before them had, they would suck it up and do it anyway). Because you can see the actions of the ones before you, and your actions are public, it’s easy to predict a positive outcome. Ultimately, it’s this kind of directed graph that created such a successful fundraiser.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/the-ice-bucket-racket.html