Being “good” or “good enough”: Prosocial risk and the structure of moral self-regard.

Abstract

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 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. 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 6 studies, we test this moral threshold model by examining people’s prosocial risk decisions. We find that, compared with 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 this means avoiding a decision that is objectively superior. We further find that this aversion to producing the worst possible prosocial outcome leads people’s prosocial (vs. egoistic) risk decisions to be less sensitive to those decisions’ maximum possible benefit. We highlight theoretical and practical implications of these findings, including the detrimental consequence that people’s desire to protect their moral self-regard can have on the amount of good that they produce.

Following Health Measures in the Pandemic: A Matter of Values?

“…Value-driven individuals avoided trade-offs in a negotiation even when this meant reaching less of their own valued goals (Schuster et al, 2020). In other studies, decision-makers mostly avoided trading off small risks or harms for outcomes with a higher potential moral payoff (Berman and Kupor, 2020;Zlatev et al, 2020 H2: Perceiving health measures as value consistent moderates the relationship of consistency with self-interests, i.e., cost or benefit of measures, with intentions to comply. The higher the value consistency of health measures, the lesser will be the influence of self-interest consistency.…”

“…Additionally, participants were asked to indicate how they would feel in case of not complying with the health measures. The three items (α = 0.909) were as follows: ( 1 (Zlatev et al, 2020). Participants answered on a 6point scale ranging from 0 (not at all) to 5 (very much).…”

“…Pointing to the relevance and consistency of the behaviors of the individuals with their core values may be an effective instrument since values serve as guiding principles in the lives of the people (Schwartz, 1992 ; Sagiv et al, 2017 ). People strive to act in line with the core values they identify with (e.g., Bardi and Schwartz, 2003 ; Maio et al, 2009 ) and try to keep up their self-regard as moral persons (Zlatev et al, 2020 ). Nevertheless, this motivation might sometimes lead individuals to favor suboptimal options (Stöckli and Tanner, 2014 ; Zlatev et al, 2020 ).…”

“…People strive to act in line with the core values they identify with (e.g., Bardi and Schwartz, 2003 ; Maio et al, 2009 ) and try to keep up their self-regard as moral persons (Zlatev et al, 2020 ). Nevertheless, this motivation might sometimes lead individuals to favor suboptimal options (Stöckli and Tanner, 2014 ; Zlatev et al, 2020 ). This research examines the role of perceived value consistency of health measures demanded from people in the pandemic for their intentions to comply.…”

The Effect of Corporate Philanthropy on Consumer Behavior: Open Innovation in the Operating Mechanism

“…Mathwick and Wiertz [30] described reciprocity as a form of social capital. If a person is more motivated to behave ethically, then his pro-social behavior to behave well will be more powerfully guided [31].…”