In four experiments, we found that the presence of self-interest in the charitable domain was seen as tainting: People evaluated efforts that realized both charitable and personal benefits as worse than analogous behaviors that produced no charitable benefit. This tainted-altruism effect was observed in a variety of contexts and extended to both moral evaluations of other agents and participant...

P matter. That's the message of Susan Mayer's new book. What Money Can't Buy.^ The University of Ghicago sociologist's sophisticated and often ingenious analyses lead her to conclude that parents' characteristics are more important than their income in determining how well they raise their children and, hence, how well their children will do in later life. Thus Mayer argues that giving low-inco...

Parental care is not the rule in fishes. Most species are quite content to abandon their offspring to the vagaries of a world populated by organisms that are fond of eating nutritious little snacks such as eggs and fry. These non-parental fishes may show discrimination as to where the eggs are deposited (covered by gravel in salmon, in thick mats of weeds for some minnows, in open water downstr...