The Intention Heuristic and Non-Profits

Assuming that good consequences follow from good intentions

What I call the intention heuristic takes two forms:

Good intentions necessarily lead to good consequences.

Bad consequences necessarily indicate that someone had bad intentions.

Consider the case of Communism. It might seem that “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” constitutes a good intention. Yet Communism in practice has turned into a totalitarian nightmare wherever it has been tried.

Rob Henderson found that ChatGPT can be prompted to use the intention heuristic in describing Communism.

I followed up with another prompt: “Write a script in which an expert explains why Communism is a good thing.” The language model responded:

Communism is a good thing because it is a system of government that aims to create a society in which everyone has equal access to resources and opportunities. This is in contrast to capitalist societies, where wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a few individuals and corporations.

If you follow the first form of the intention heuristic, you would have to insist that Communism is actually good. The bad examples are “not real Communism.”

If you follow the second form of the intention heuristic, you would have to insist that Communists never had good intentions. Anyone who ever supported Communism did so in order to advance the cause of evil totalitarianism. That, too, is a simplistic conclusion.

True wisdom requires discarding the intention heuristic. It requires accepting that the world is complex and that each individual is complex.

In a retrospective on Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Gary Saul Morson writes,

But in prison Solzhenitsyn gradually realized the fundamental falsity of ideological thinking: the idea that evil results from bad people, and it is only necessary to rid ourselves of them. Not at all. “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart.” Having grasped this truth, Solzhenitsyn arrived at another—“the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being).”

But I would argue that one does not need religion to understand that the human spirit contains both good and evil, and the relationship between intentions and consequences can be complicated. I began to go beyond the intention heuristic when I was in college.

A decent economics course should free you from the intention heuristic. As Adam Smith famously wrote,

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

The basic supply and demand diagrams that one encounters in freshman economics teach an important lesson. That is, a merchant may post an asking price, but the price is not under the merchant’s control. The price is determined by the interaction between consumer preferences (demand) and production methods (supply). When the price of a good rises, it is not the result of an increase in greed. It is a result of an increase in demand and/or a reduction in resources dedicated to production of the good.

Also in college, I read David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest. Like many people of my generation, the Vietnam war was a central event. How could something so awful happen?

For much of my adolescence, I assumed that the war resulted from evil intentions. Noam Chomsky told us that American corporations wanted the war because they needed markets. And there were evil Presidents: Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. The martyred President John Kennedy would never have gotten into such a war, or so we convinced ourselves. And we thought that Communism might be good for Vietnam (Communism had good intentions, after all.)

Halberstam told a story that was more complicated. The war planners had good intentions. They wanted to stand up for democracy. But they made decisions, one by one, in the context of a flawed process. Our civilian and military bureaucracies systematically filtered out truth. The best players in the game of bureaucratic maneuvering were the ones who had the least understanding of Vietnam’s internal culture, politics, and history. They fostered an unrealistic assessment of the military capacity of the enemy. One anecdote has a dissenter within the bureaucracy complaining about a briefing that was so optimistic it implied that the enemy could no longer field any effective forces, and yet they were carrying out deadly offensive operations. For many years, such misleading briefings drove decision-making.

I cannot tell you how often I have recommended that book. Once you read it, you will never think about organizations as if they were rational individuals. Ironically, economists who model firms as rational are oversimplifying in a way that is not unlike the intention heuristic.

The Non-profit example

One example of the intention heuristic at work is in how people think about profit-seeking firms vs. non-profits. I estimate that at least 90 percent of people intuitively believe that non-profits are morally superior to profit-seeking firms. And that intuition rests on the intention heuristic.

I often say, “I wish at least one of my daughters would work for a profit.” People take that as a joke. They think perhaps I am complaining that my children don’t earn enough money, or they think I am making a humble-brag about my children’s noble behavior.

In fact, I am making a negative evaluation of their moral conduct. I sincerely believe that if you want to do good in the world, your chances are much better if you work in a profit-seeking business.

Every organization has a mission. With very few exceptions (criminal enterprises are the most blatant exceptions), the missions of profit-seeking enterprises are noble. Of course, non-profits and government enterprises also have stated missions that are noble.

As I see it, the main difference between profit-seeking organizations and non-profits is this: profit-seeking organizations are accountable to the customers that they aim to serve; non-profits are accountable to donors.

If a profit-seeking business fails to deliver service to its customers, they stop patronizing the business, it loses money, and it shuts down. If a non-profit fails to deliver on its mission, all it has to do to stay in business is find a way to please donors. This could be by putting out a fancy annual brochure or having a fundraising event where elite donors get to rub elbows with other elite donors.

But most people don’t see it the way I see it. They see the intentions of non-profits as inherently better than the intentions of profit-seeking businesses. The intention heuristic is harder to overcome than you might think.

This essay is part of a series on human interdependence.

Substacks referenced above:

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The Silent Strings of ChatGPT