Self-interest and other-interest motives in prosocial behavior

People often engage in behaviors that benefit both themselves and others. In particular, people frequently receive something in exchange for their prosocial behavior. These self-interested benefits can take the form of tangible items, feelings of moral self-regard, or a positive image in the eyes of others. I explore how people navigate these various motives and their effects on prosocial decision making. Chapter 1 examines the inconsistency in existing research showing that appeals to self-interest sometimes increase and sometimes decrease prosocial behavior. I propose that this inconsistency is in part due to the framings of these appeals. Different framings generate different salient reference points, leading to different assessments of the appeal. Study 1 demonstrates that buying an item with the proceeds going to charity evokes a different set of alternative behaviors than donating and receiving an item in return. Studies 2 and 3a-g establish that people are more willing to act, and give more when they do, when reading the former framing than the latter. Study 4 establishes ecological validity by replicating the effect in a field experiment assessing participants' actual charitable contributions. Finally, Study 5 provides additional process evidence via moderation for the proposed mechanism. Chapter 2 further examines how the motivation to feel moral guides people's behavior. I propose that people's efforts to preserve their moral self-regard conform to a moral threshold model. This model predicts that people are primarily concerned with whether their prosocial behavior legitimates the claim that they have acted morally, a claim that often diverges from whether their behavior is in the best interests of the recipient of the prosocial behavior. Specifically, it predicts that for people to feel moral following a prosocial decision, that decision need not have promised the greatest benefit for the recipient but only one larger than at least one other available outcome. Moreover, this model predicts that once people produce a benefit that exceeds this threshold, their moral self-regard is relatively insensitive to the magnitude of benefit that they produce. In seven studies, I test this moral threshold model by examining people's prosocial risk decisions. I find that, compared to risky egoistic decisions, people systematically avoid making risky prosocial decisions that carry the possibility of producing the worst possible outcome in a choice set—even when those decisions are objectively superior. I further find that people's greater aversion to producing the worst possible outcome when the beneficiary is a prosocial cause leads their prosocial (vs. egoistic) risk decisions to be less sensitive to those decisions' maximum possible benefit. Finally, Chapter 3 explores the potential drawbacks that come with behaving prosocially in public. Specifically, I argue that being identified for one's prosocial behavior can sometimes crowd out feelings of moral self-regard. This in turn, leads to a preference for private acts of prosociality over public ones. Five studies provide evidence that, when given the option between engaging in prosocial behavior in public or in private, people often choose the latter—contrary to prior work. In further support of a crowding out effect, people perceived private prosocial behavior to be more moral than public prosocial behavior. However, this difference in morality between public and private behavior was malleable and depended on the salient comparison point used, providing evidence that contextual factors play a role in how the identifiability of a prosocial act affects one's moral self-regard.

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Miller Dale T. 
Flynn Francis J. 
Halevy Nir