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A man approached me on a recent evening as I was getting into my car. He told me a variation on a familiar story: he had run out of gas and had with him neither money nor a credit card. His car was a couple blocks away, and his wife and kids were waiting for him there. They were all waiting take his wife's broken laptop to a store a couple miles away where they could get it fixed. He wondered if I had any gas, or any money, and he promised to pay me back.
I honestly felt bad for the man, and I stopped and talked with him, trying to assess how certain I was that he was just panhandling. In the end, I didn't give him money, mostly because I had heard (and fallen for) almost the same story from a different panhandler in a different part of the country several years before. What struck me, though, was how much the slim chance that he was genuine made me reluctant to walk away without helping. There are a certainly a lot of times when we would rather avoid getting near people who are down on their luck, let alone trying to help. Why, then, did I want so much to help this person?
Panhandlers feed us nothing if not a story of being down on their luck, and not only do people stick around to hear it (if they didn't, panhandlers would tell a different story) but people actually pay up. Why? Because the story we are hearing is one in which there is but one small step between a needy person's bad situation and a good outcome. As personality psychologist Dan McAdams has observed, we Americans love redemption stories: narratives in which hardship and suffering yield to growth and happiness. What panhandlers are selling us is an opportunity to make that critical difference. A one-time payment of $5 is enough to help this person get back on their feet -- to single-handedly turn a hard-luck story into the kind of story that we love.
