The Importance of Self-Interest in Volunteer Work

Sociologist Robert Wuthnau found that even people who acted altruistically tended to offer self-interested explanations, sometimes quite implausible ones. Literature is full of characters like Mollières Tartuf who pretend to be altruistically motivated when they are really self-seeking. We have a word for them: Hypocrits. But there are fewer literary examples of people who are really altruistic, but pretend to be self-interested and there is, as far as I know, no single word to describe them. In his book, Acts of Compassion, WuthNau offers a striking real-life example of this type. Jack Casey says that his own interests