Moral Traps: When Self-serving Attributions Backfire in Prosocial Behavior

Stephanie C. Lin; Julian  Zlatev; Dale T. Miller

Article | Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

Moral Traps: When Self-serving Attributions Backfire in Prosocial Behavior

by Stephanie C. Lin, Julian Zlatev and Dale T. Miller

Abstract

Two assumptions guide the current research. First, people's desire to see themselves as moral disposes them to make attributions that enhance or protect their moral self-image: When approached with a prosocial request, people are inclined to attribute their own noncompliance to external factors, while attributing their own compliance to internal factors. Second, these attributions can backfire when put to a material test. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that people who attribute their refusal of a prosocial request to an external factor (e.g., having an appointment), but then have that excuse removed, are more likely to engage in prosocial behavior than those who were never given an excuse to begin with. Study 3 shows that people view it as more morally reprehensible to no longer honor the acceptance of a prosocial request if an accompanying external incentive is removed than to refuse a request unaccompanied by an external incentive. Study 4 extends this finding and suggests that people who attribute the decision to behave prosocially to an internal factor despite the presence of an external incentive are more likely to continue to behave prosocially once the external incentive is removed than are those for whom no external incentive was ever offered. This research contributes to an understanding of the dynamics underlying the perpetuation of moral self-regard and suggests interventions to increase prosocial behavior.

Keywords: Morality; attributions; decision making; prosocial behavior; Moral Sensibility; Behavior; Perception;

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Lin, Stephanie C., Julian Zlatev, and Dale T. Miller. "Moral Traps: When Self-serving Attributions Backfire in Prosocial Behavior." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 70 (May 2017): 198–203.

Biases influence important decisions, but little is known about whether and how individuals try to exploit others’ biases in strategic interactions. Choice architects—that is, people who present choices to others—must often decide between presenting choice sets with positive or certain options (influencing others toward safer options) versus presenting choice sets with negative or risky options (influencing others toward riskier options). We show that choice architects’ influence strategies are distorted toward presenting choice sets with positive or certain options across thirteen studies involving diverse samples (executives, law/business/medical students, adults) and contexts (public policy, business, medicine). These distortions appear to primarily reflect decision biases rather than social preferences, and they can cause choice architects to use influence strategies that backfire.

Article | Academy of Management Annals | 2019

Brokerage and Brokering: An Integrative Review and Organizing Framework for Third Party Influence

Nir Halevy, Eliran Halali and Julian Zlatev

Brokerage and brokering are pervasive and consequential organizational phenomena. Prevailing models underscore social structure and focus on the consequences that come from brokerage—occupying a bridging position between disconnected others in a network. By contrast, emerging models underscore social interactions and focus on brokering—the behavioral processes through which organizational actors shape others’ relationships. Our review led us to develop a novel framework as a means to integrate and organize a wide range of theoretical insights and empirical findings on brokerage and brokering. The Changing Others’ Relationships (COR) framework captures the following ideas that emerged from our review: (a) Different triadic configurations enable different forms of brokering, which in turn produce distinct effects on others’ relationships; (b) brokering is a multifaceted social influence process that can take the form of intermediation (connecting disconnected others) or modification (changing others’ preexisting relationships); (c) comparing social relations, for instance prebrokering versus postbrokering, reveals a broker’s impact; (d) brokering can influence others’ relationships positively or negatively; and (e) information and incentives are two principal means through which individuals change others’ relationships. Overall, the current review integrates multiple streams of research relevant to brokerage and brokering—including those on structural holes, organizational innovation, boundary spanning, social and political skill, workplace gossip, third-party conflict managers, and labor relations—and links each of the emergent themes identified in the current review to promising directions for future research on brokerage and brokering.

Keywords: brokerage; brokering; social interactions; Organizations; Relationships; Power and Influence; Framework;

Citation:

Halevy, Nir, Eliran Halali, and Julian Zlatev. "Brokerage and Brokering: An Integrative Review and Organizing Framework for Third Party Influence." Academy of Management Annals 13, no. 1 (2019): 215–239. View Details

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Current theories suggest that people understand how to exploit common biases to influence others. However, these predictions have received little empirical attention. We consider a widely studied bias with special policy relevance: the default effect, which is the tendency to choose whichever option is the status quo. We asked participants (including managers, law/business/medical students, and US adults) to nudge others toward selecting a target option by choosing whether to present that target option as the default. In contrast to theoretical predictions, we find that people often fail to understand and/or use defaults to influence others, i.e., they show “default neglect.” First, in one-shot default-setting games, we find that only 50.8% of participants set the target option as the default across 11 samples (n = 2,844), consistent with people not systematically using defaults at all. Second, when participants have multiple opportunities for experience and feedback, they still do not systematically use defaults. Third, we investigate beliefs related to the default effect. People seem to anticipate some mechanisms that drive default effects, yet most people do not believe in the default effect on average, even in cases where they do use defaults. We discuss implications of default neglect for decision making, social influence, and evidence-based policy.

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Moral Traps: When Self-serving Attributions Backfire in Prosocial Behavior

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