Does Maximizing Good Make People Look Bad?

Abstract

People make inferences about others depending on the way they arrive at their moral decisions. Here, we examine evaluations of people who make moral decisions through deliberation compared to those who decide based on empathy. To do so, we turn to charitable donations. People often fail to prioritize the cost-effectiveness of charities when donating . We argue that this pattern exists in part because donors who make charitable decisions by deliberating about the cost-effectiveness of charities are perceived as less moral and less desirable as social partners than those who decide based on empathizing with the recipients of the donation. Across six pre-registered studies using two different scenarios (N = 1,961), we presented participants with descriptions of people who thought about donation decisions by either deliberating about the costeffectiveness of charities, or by deciding based on empathy. Reliably, participants judged "deliberators" to have less positive moral character and to be less desirable as social partners than "empathizers." We found these results across different designs (between-subjects and within-subjects), when evaluating respondents of different genders (male and female), and for donations of different stakes (low and high). The negative reputational effects of deliberating were reduced if "deliberators" expressed empathy first. These results suggest that there may be disincentives for selecting charities based on their impact, since people are not socially rewarded for prioritizing charitable impact but are rewarded for signaling the right kinds of moral traits. We end by discussing implications and limitations of these findings.

Boosting the impact of charitable giving

“…More specifically, we predict that a bundler donor's support for their favorite charity will earn them credit for being warm due to perceived empathy, while their support of the effective charity will earn them credit for being competent, as competence is the capacity for effectiveness. By contrast, we expect that people who donate exclusively to their favorite charity will be seen as comparably warm, but less competent, than bundle donors, while people who donate exclusively to the effective charity will be perceived as comparably competent, but less warm than bundle donors (Montealegre, Bush, Moss, Pizarro, & Jimenez-Leal, 2020).…”

The Psychology of (In)Effective Altruism

“…This favors visible personal sacrifice over social benefit [58] and donations based on mutually salient emotional factors [59] rather than complex calculations [60]. Consistent with this, people whose donations are based on deliberation rather than empathy are viewed less positively [61]. Under prevailing norms, donors have relatively little reputational incentive to give effectively.…”

No good deed goes unpunished: the social costs of prosocial behaviour

“…Participants who cooperate without knowing the cost of doing so (Jordan et al, 2016) -or who make their decision quickly (Critcher et al, 2013;Evans & van de Calseyde, 2017) -are perceived as more prosocial or trustworthy by others -as are those who make deontological, rather than utilitarian, decisions when faced with moral dilemmas (Everett et al, 2016). Similarly, individuals who donate based on the cost-effectiveness of the charity, rather than based on the degree of empathy they feel for the beneficiaries, are evaluated less positively by others (Montealegre et al, 2020). Subjects who cooperate in seemingly one-shot encounters are also perceived as more trustworthy than those who cooperate in encounters that they know will be repeated (Johnsen & Kvaløy, 2016), perhaps because cooperating in interactions that are known to be repeated is more indicative of strategic motives.…”