Forgoing earned incentives to signal pure motives

Abstract

<jats:p>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 often effective at inducing good behavior, they’ve been shown to have self-image costs: Those who receive incentives view their actions less positively due to the perceived incompatibility between financial incentives and intrinsic motives. We test an intervention that allows organizations and individuals to resolve this tension: We use financial rewards to kick-start good behavior and then offer individuals the opportunity to give up some or all of their earned financial rewards in order to boost their self-image. Two preregistered studies—an incentivized online experiment (<jats:italic>n</jats:italic> = 763) on prosocial behavior and a large field experiment (<jats:italic>n</jats:italic> = 17,968) on exercise—provide evidence that emphasizing the intrinsic rewards of a past action leads individuals to forgo or donate earned financial rewards. Our intervention allows individuals to retroactively signal that they acted for the right reason, which we call “motivation laundering.” We discuss the implications of motivation laundering for the design of incentive systems and behavioral change.</jats:p>

Market Cognition: How Exchange Norms Alter Social Experience

“…In one set of studies, observers rated generous acts accompanied by market incentivessuch as tax breaks for charitable donations-as non-prosocial, and in some cases more selfish than not helping others at all (Carlson & Zaki, 2018). People are aware of this, and in some cases purposefully avoid incentives to signal the authenticity of their own prosocial behaviors (Kirgios, Chang, Levine, Milkman, & Kessler, 2020).…”

Promoting Adherence to Joint Exercise Using the Donation Model: Proof via a Motion-Detecting Mobile Exercise Coaching Application

“…Meanwhile, regarding these incentive exercise models, an argument has been raised that the financial incentive itself may undermine the basic value of physical activity. 25 Indeed, such financial incentive models are difficult to apply in the clinical field since long-term funding is limited. On the other hand, applying the charity model consistently in the healthcare market may be easier because a social system allowing participating companies to receive tax benefits from providing financial resources is already in place.…”

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

“…Gneezy & Rustichini, 2000;Mellström & Johannesson, 2008;Moussaoui et al, 2019;Newman & Jeremy Shen, 2012;Shi, 2011). These negative effects can be ameliorated by giving people the opportunity to forego the external incentive (Mellström & Johannesson, 2008) -and other work indicates that people often engage in such 'motivational laundering': foregoing an external incentive to remove ambiguity about the motives underlying their charitable actions (Kirgios et al, 2020).…”