Prosocial behavior and reputation: When does doing good lead to looking good?

doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.06.021

Current Opinion in Psychology

Volume 43, February 2022, Pages 102-107

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.06.021 Get rights and content

Abstract

One reason people engage in prosocial behavior is to reap the reputational benefits associated with being seen as generous. Yet, there isn't a direct connection between doing good deeds and being seen as a good person. Prosocial actors are often met with suspicion and sometimes castigated as disingenuous braggarts, empty virtue-signalers, or holier-than-thou hypocrites. In this article, we review recent research on how people evaluate those who engage in prosocial behavior and identify key factors that influence whether observers will praise or denigrate a prosocial actor for doing a good deed.

Section snippets

Context

This article examines how people judge those who act generously, contribute to charity, or engage in prosocial behavior.¹

Motives matter

While actors are often praised for their good deeds, there isn't a direct connection between doing a good deed and receiving credit for it. Rather, observers care deeply about a prosocial actor's underlying motives: did the actor really care about helping others, or were they motivated — at least in part — by a desire to help themself?

Theories of costly signaling argue that observers judge the motives of others by the extent to which they are willing to sacrifice to accomplish a goal [8,9].

Motive ambiguity and do-gooder derogation

Although people care deeply about the motives of do-gooders, motives are difficult to verify. This leaves observers with flexibility to judge actors however they wish. Anecdotally, it seems that when observers feel motivated to disparage, they do not need to draw on much evidence. Simply saying that an actor wanted to improve his or her reputation or that a do-gooder is ‘smug’ may often be enough to discredit their good deeds. Such cases have in common an element of ‘observer wiggle room’

Are emotions selfish?

The logic of altruism suggests that any selfish incentive should be sufficient to taint a selfless act. Is this true for emotional incentives such as feeling a ‘warm glow’ from performing a good deed?

Philosophers, psychologists, and economists have all argued that emotional reasons for giving are self-gratifying, and therefore ought to be met with suspicion [30, 31, 32]. However, laypeople hold a more positive view of the role of emotions in prosocial behavior. Whereas observers discount

Generosity and self-promotion

Doing good can only improve an actor's reputation if others know about it. Yet, advertising one's generosity is a risky proposition. There exist strong norms that good deeds should be anonymous, and those who tell others about their generosity are often seen as disingenuous self-promoters [42••, 43, 44, 45].

Talking about one's generosity sends two opposing signals. It communicates that a good deed has been performed, which signals selflessness, but it also suggests the actor may want credit for

Little credit for impact and effectiveness

If the goal of donating to charity is to help others, then individuals should presumably receive more credit when their good deeds achieve more benefits. But, at least descriptively, this does not seem to be the case. Rather, charitable credit is much more sensitive to how much an actor gains or sacrifices while doing a good deed than how much the act benefits others [11,12,50,51].²

Obligations to personal relations

One complicating factor that affects how actors are judged by others concerns whether they are donating to a cause that benefits a close personal relation. Recent theories of morality suggest that people see others as obligated to help close personal relations over distant strangers [64,65]. Despite these obligations, or perhaps because of them, prosocial actors are afforded less credit when they donate to causes that benefit close others, doing so is seen as relatively selfish compared to

Future directions: strengthening norms around giving?

The research reviewed here examines how individual do-gooders are judged by observers. However, some of the most challenging questions concern how to use reputational incentives to strengthen norms around giving. Indeed, if one major reason why individuals do good deeds is to reap reputational rewards [51], then how can we use what we know about the psychology of moral credit to engender a ‘culture of giving’?

Currently, societal norms about how much people ought to sacrifice and which causes

Conflict of interest statement

Nothing declared.

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Do people judge those who overcome temptation as more virtuous than those who don't feel tempted in the first place? Because prior research provides conflicting answers to this question, the current paper uses an expanded set of methodological and statistical tools to solve this puzzle. First, we replicated results of prior research showing that agents who overcome temptation are seen as less virtuous than non-tempted agents, with 74–78% of people making this judgment. Second, we used participant-generated stimuli and one measure from each of two published papers to rule out stimulus and measurement sampling as explanations for the previous opposite effects. We replicated our original results: 72–75% of people judged agents who overcame temptation as less virtuous than non-tempted agents. Third, we investigated whether judgments were moderated by relationship context. Again, the majority of people judged agents who overcame temptation–that would harm strangers or close others–as less virtuous than non-tempted agents. Additionally, the following interaction effect was the most common (modal) pattern: While judging tempted agents as less virtuous than non-tempted agents within each relationship context, 39% of people judged agents who were tempted to act in a way that would harm close others as even less virtuous than those agents whose temptations would harm strangers. Together, these results provide a detailed moral psychological account of temptation by: resolving a puzzle in the literature, revealing moderation by relationship context, and documenting the pervasiveness of this effect across stimuli, measures, and persons.
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Children are eager to take credit for prosocial acts, and cost affects this tendency
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We report two experiments on children's tendency to enhance their reputations through communicative acts. In the experiments, 4-year-olds (N = 120) had the opportunity to inform a social partner that they had helped him in his absence. In a first experiment, we pitted a prosocial act (“Let’s help clean up for Doggie!”) against an instrumental act (“Let’s move these out of our way”). Children in the prosocial condition were quicker to inform their partner of the act and more likely to protest when another individual was given credit for it. In a second experiment, we replicated the prosocial condition but with a new manipulation: high-cost versus low-cost helping. We manipulated both the language surrounding cost (i.e., “This will be pretty tough to clean up” vs. “It will be really easy to clean this up”) and how difficult the task itself was. As predicted, children in the high-cost condition were quicker to inform their partner of the act and more likely to take back credit for it. These results suggest that even 4-year-old children make active attempts to elicit positive reputational judgments for their prosocial acts, with cost as a moderating factor.
Identifying social partners through indirect prosociality: A computational account
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The ability to identify people who are prosocial, supportive, and mindful of others is critical for choosing social partners. While past work has emphasized the information value of direct social interactions (such as watching someone help or hinder others), social tendencies can also be inferred from indirect evidence, such as how an agent considers others when making personal choices. Here we present a computational model of this capacity, grounded in a Bayesian framework for action understanding. Across four experiments we show that this model captures how people infer social preferences based on how agents act when their choices indirectly impact others (Experiments 1a, 1b, & 1c), and how people infer what an agent knows about others from knowledge of that agent’s social preferences (Experiment 2). Critically, people’s patterns of inferences could not be explained by simpler alternatives. These findings illuminate how people can discern potential social partners from indirect evidence of their prosociality, thus deepening our understanding of partner detection, and social cognition more broadly.
Feeling warm or skeptical? An investigation into the effects of incentivized eWOM programs on customers’ eWOM sharing intentions
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Marketing managers frequently provide incentives to customers to encourage electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) sharing. Yet, the literature remains unclear as to which forms of incentives are more effective than others. We conduct three experimental studies to investigate the effect of incentive type (economic vs. altruistic) on customers’ eWOM sharing intentions. Drawing on social judgment theory and attribution theory, in Study 1, we show that altruistic incentives generate higher eWOM sharing intention than economic incentives. We also reveal the mediating roles of customers’ perceptions of warmth and skepticism toward the company in the incentive type–eWOM sharing intention relationship. Studies 2 and 3 aim to identify the target customers of incentivized eWOM programs. In Study 2, we find that altruistic incentives are better provided to customers who are alone, as opposed to those with fellow customers. In Study 3, we find an interesting reverse effect of incentive type: altruistic incentives are less effective than economic incentives in producing eWOM sharing intention if customers have a weak tie with the company.
The dark side of generosity: Employees with a reputation for giving are selectively targeted for exploitation
2023, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
People endorse generosity as a moral virtue worth exemplifying, and those who acquire reputations for generosity are admired and publicly celebrated. In an organizational context, hiring, retaining, and promoting generous employees can make organizations more appealing to customers, suppliers, and top talent. However, using complementary methods and experimental designs with large samples of full-time managers, we find consistent evidence that managers are inclined to take unfair advantage of employees with reputations for generosity, selectively targeting them for exploitation in ways that likely, and ironically, hamper long-term organizational success. This selective targeting of generous employees for exploitation was statistically explained by a problematic assumption: Since they have reputations for generosity, managers assume that, if they had the opportunity, they would have freely volunteered for their own exploitation. We also investigate a possible solution to the targeting of more generous employees for exploitative practices. Merely asking managers to make a judgment about the ethics of an exploitative request eliminates their propensity to target generous employees over other employees for exploitation.

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ReviewProsocial behavior and reputation: When does doing good lead to looking good?

Abstract

Section snippets

Context

Motives matter

Motive ambiguity and do-gooder derogation

Are emotions selfish?

Generosity and self-promotion

Little credit for impact and effectiveness

Obligations to personal relations

Future directions: strengthening norms around giving?

Conflict of interest statement

Curr Opin Psychol

Evol Hum Behav

Consum Psychol Rev

Psychol Bull

J Pers Soc Psychol

J Exp Soc Psychol

J Market Res

Nat Hum Behav

Psychol Rev

Biol Lett

The evolution of charitable behaviour and the power of reputation

A literature review of empirical studies of philanthropy: eight mechanisms that drive charitable giving

Nonprofit Voluntary Sect Q

Impure altruism and donations to public goods: a theory of warm-glow giving

Econ J

Nice guys finish first: the competitive altruism hypothesis

Pers Soc Psychol Bull

Are we nice(r) to nice(r) people?—an experimental analysis

Exp Econ

Incentives and prosocial behavior

Am Econ Rev

Reliability in communication systems and the evolution of altruism

The road to heaven is paved with effort: perceived effort amplifies moral judgment

J Exp Psychol Gen

Dimensions of altruism: do evaluations of prosocial behavior track social good or personal sacrifice?

Type and amount of help as predictors for impression of helpers

PloS One

The norm of self-interest

Am Psychol

The disparity between the actual and assumed power of self-interest

J Pers Soc Psychol

Nice guys finish last and guys in last are nice: the clash between doing well and doing good

Soc Psychol Personal Sci

No good deed goes unquestioned: cynical reconstruals maintain belief in the power of self-interest

J Exp Soc Psychol

Tainted altruism: when doing some good is evaluated as worse than doing no good at all

Psychol Sci

Good deeds gone bad: lay theories of altruism and selfishness

J Exp Soc Psychol

Doing good for (maybe) nothing: motive inferences when rewards are uncertain

How quick decisions illuminate moral character

Soc Psychol Personal Sci

Rare and costly prosocial behaviors are perceived as heroic

Front Psychol

Selfless first movers and self-interested followers: order of entry signals purity of motive in pursuit of the greater good

J Consum Psychol

When it pays to be kind: the allocation of indirect reciprocity within power hierarchies

Organ Behav Hum Decis Process

Do-gooder derogation: disparaging morally motivated minorities to defuse anticipated reproach

Soc Psychol Personal Sci

Why hate the good guy? Antisocial punishment of high cooperators is greater when people compete to be chosen

Psychol Sci

Altruism does not always lead to a good reputation: a normative explanation

J Exp Soc Psychol

Foundation of the metaphysics of morals (L. W. Beck, Trans.)

Transgression and altruism: a case for hedonism

J Exp Soc Psychol

Impure altruism and donations to public goods: a theory of warm-glow giving

Econ J

Review
Prosocial behavior and reputation: When does doing good lead to looking good?