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- 2021
- Article
Does Observability Amplify Sensitivity to Moral Frames? Evaluating a Reputation-Based Account of Moral Preferences
By: Valerio Capraro, Jillian J. Jordan and Ben Tappin
A growing body of work suggests that people are sensitive to moral framing in economic games involving prosociality, suggesting that people hold moral preferences for doing the “right thing”. What gives rise to these preferences? Here, we evaluate the explanatory power...
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- March 2021
- Article
Opting-in to Prosocial Incentives
By: Daniel Schwartz, Elizabeth A. Keenan, Alex Imas and Ayelet Gneezy
The design of effective incentive schemes that are both successful in motivating employees and keeping down costs is of critical importance. Research has demonstrated that prosocial incentives, where individuals’ effort benefits a charitable organization, can sometimes...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Does Observability Amplify Sensitivity to Moral Frames? Evaluating a Reputation-Based Account of Moral Preferences
By: Valerio Capraro, Jillian J. Jordan and Ben Tappin
A growing body of work suggests that people are sensitive to moral framing in economic games involving prosociality, suggesting that people hold moral preferences for doing the “right thing”. What gives rise to these preferences? Here, we evaluate the explanatory power...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Don't Get It or Don't Spread It? Comparing Self-interested versus Prosocial Motivations for COVID-19 Prevention Behaviors
By: Jillian J. Jordan, Erez Yoeli and David Rand
Efforts to avoid COVID-19 infection may be seen as self-interested or prosocial. Using American samples from Amazon Turk and Prolific (total n = 6,850), we investigated which framing is more effective—and motivation is stronger—for fostering intentions to engage in...
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- 2021
- Article
Helping and Happiness: A Review and Guide for Public Policy
By: Lara B. Aknin and Ashley V. Whillans
Perhaps one of the most reaffirming findings to emerge over the past several decades is that humans not only engage in generous behavior, they also appear to experience pleasure from doing so. Yet not all acts of helping lead to greater happiness. Here, we review the...
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- August 2020
- Article
Does Spending Money on Others Promote Happiness? A Registered Replication Report
By: Lara B. Aknin, Elizabeth W. Dunn, Jason Proulx, Iris Lok and Michael I. Norton
Research indicates that spending money on others—prosocial spending—leads to greater happiness than spending money on oneself (e.g., Dunn, Aknin, & Norton, 2008, 2014). These findings have received widespread attention because they offer insight into why people engage...
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- Article
Forgoing Earned Incentives to Signal Pure Motives
By: Erika L. Kirgios, Edward H. Chang, Emma E. Levine, Katherine L. Milkman and Judd B. Kessler
Policy makers, employers, and insurers often provide financial incentives to encourage citizens, employees, and customers to take actions that are good for them or for society (e.g., energy conservation, healthy living, safe driving). Although financial incentives are...
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- February 2020
- Article
Being 'Good' or 'Good Enough': Prosocial Risk and the Structure of Moral Self-regard
By: Julian Zlatev, Daniella M. Kupor, Kristin Laurin and Dale T. Miller
The motivation to feel moral powerfully guides people’s prosocial behavior. We 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...
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- Article
Prosocial Spending and Buying Time: Money as a Tool for Increasing Subjective Well-Being
By: Elizabeth Dunn, A.V. Whillans, Michael I. Norton and Lara B. Aknin
Researchers have long been interested in the relationship between income and happiness, but a newer wave of work suggests that how people use their money also matters. We discuss the three primary areas in which psychologists have explored the relationship...
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- 2019
- Chapter
Happiness and Prosocial Behavior: An Evaluation of the Evidence
By: Lara B. Aknin, Ashley V. Whillans, Michael I. Norton and Elizabeth W. Dunn
Humans are an extremely prosocial species. Compared to most primates, humans provide more assistance to family, friends, and strangers, even when costly. Why do people devote their resources to helping others? In this chapter, we examine whether engaging in prosocial...
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- November 2018
- Article
Global Evidence on Economic Preferences
By: Armin Falk, Anke Becker, Thomas Dohmen, Benjamin Enke, David Huffman and Uwe Sunde
This article studies the global variation in economic preferences. For this purpose, we present the Global Preference Survey (GPS), an experimentally validated survey data set of time preference, risk preference, positive and negative reciprocity, altruism, and trust...
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- Article
Enacting Rituals to Improve Self-control
By: D. A. Tian, J. Schroeder, G. Haubl, J. Risen, M. I. Norton and F. Gino
Rituals are predefined sequences of actions characterized by rigidity and repetition. We propose that enacting ritualized actions can enhance subjective feelings of self-discipline, such that rituals can be harnessed to improve behavioral self-control. We test this...
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- May 2018
- Article
Incentives for Prosocial Behavior: The Role of Reputations
Do monetary incentives encourage volunteering? Or, do they introduce concerns about appearing greedy and crowd out the motivation to volunteer? Since the importance of such image concerns is normally unobserved, the answer is theoretically unclear, and corresponding...
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- 2018
- Working Paper
Thanks for Nothing: Expressing Gratitude Invites Exploitation by Competitors
By: Jeremy Yip, Kelly Kiyeon Lee, Cindy Chan and Alison Wood Brooks
Previous research has revealed that expressing gratitude motivates prosocial behavior in cooperative relationships. However, expressing gratitude in competitive interactions may operate differently. Across five studies, we demonstrate that individuals interacting with...
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- February 2018
- Article
The Impact of a Surprise Donation Ask
By: Christine L. Exley and Ragan Petrie
Individuals frequently exploit "flexibility" built into decision environments to give less. They use uncertainty to justify options benefiting themselves over others, they avoid information that may encourage them to give, and they avoid the ask itself. In this paper,...
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- May–June 2017
- Article
Multiple Identity Configurations: The Benefits of Focused Enhancement for Prosocial Behavior
By: Lakshmi Ramarajan, Ida Berger and Itay Greenspan
- Article
Moral Traps: When Self-serving Attributions Backfire in Prosocial Behavior
By: Stephanie C. Lin, Julian Zlatev and Dale T. Miller
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...
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Keywords:
Morality;
Attributions;
Decision Making;
Prosocial Behavior;
Moral Sensibility;
Behavior;
Perception
- Article
Selfishly Benevolent or Benevolently Selfish? When Self-interest Undermines versus Promotes Prosocial Behavior
By: Julian Zlatev and Dale T. Miller
Existing research shows that appeals to self-interest sometimes increase and sometimes decrease prosocial behavior. We propose that this inconsistency is in part due to the framings of these appeals. Different framings generate different salient reference points,...
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- Article
Is Spending Money on Others Good for Your Heart?
By: A.V. Whillans, E.W. Dunn, G.M. Sandstrom, S.S. Dickerson and K.M. Madden
OBJECTIVE:
Does spending money on others (prosocial spending) improve the cardiovascular health of community-dwelling older adults diagnosed with high blood pressure?
METHOD:
In Study 1, 186 older adults diagnosed with high blood pressure participating in the Midlife...
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- July 2015
- Article
Prosocial Norms in the Classroom: The Role of Self-regulation in Following Norms of Giving
By: P. R. Blake, M. Piovesan, N. Montinari, F. Werneken and F. Gino
Children who are prosocial in elementary school tend to have higher academic achievement and experience greater acceptance by their peers in adolescence. Despite this positive influence on educational outcomes, it is still unclear why some children are more prosocial...
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