How thoughtful
You Didn't Have to Do That: Belief in Free Will Promotes Gratitude
Michael MacKenzie, Kathleen Vohs & Roy Baumeister
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Four studies tested the hypothesis that a weaker belief in free will would be related to feeling less gratitude. In Studies 1a and 1b, a trait measure of free will belief was positively correlated with a measure of dispositional gratitude. In Study 2, participants whose free will belief was weakened (vs. unchanged or bolstered) reported feeling less grateful for events in their past. Study 3 used a laboratory induction of gratitude. Participants with an experimentally reduced (vs. increased) belief in free will reported feeling less grateful for the favor. In Study 4, a reduced (vs. increased) belief in free will led to less gratitude in a hypothetical favor scenario. This effect was serially mediated by perceiving the benefactor as having less free will and therefore as being less sincerely motivated. These findings suggest that belief in free will is an important part of being able to feel gratitude.
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Karina Schumann, Jamil Zaki & Carol Dweck
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, September 2014, Pages 475-493
Abstract:
Empathy is often thought to occur automatically. Yet, empathy frequently breaks down when it is difficult or distressing to relate to people in need, suggesting that empathy is often not felt reflexively. Indeed, the United States as a whole is said to be displaying an empathy deficit. When and why does empathy break down, and what predicts whether people will exert effort to experience empathy in challenging contexts? Across 7 studies, we found that people who held a malleable mindset about empathy (believing empathy can be developed) expended greater empathic effort in challenging contexts than did people who held a fixed theory (believing empathy cannot be developed). Specifically, a malleable theory of empathy - whether measured or experimentally induced - promoted (a) more self-reported effort to feel empathy when it is challenging (Study 1); (b) more empathically effortful responses to a person with conflicting views on personally important sociopolitical issues (Studies 2-4); (c) more time spent listening to the emotional personal story of a racial outgroup member (Study 5); and (d) greater willingness to help cancer patients in effortful, face-to-face ways (Study 6). Study 7 revealed a possible reason for this greater empathic effort in challenging contexts: a stronger interest in improving one's empathy. Together, these data suggest that people's mindsets powerfully affect whether they exert effort to empathize when it is needed most, and these data may represent a point of leverage in increasing empathic behaviors on a broad scale.
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Keith Botner, Arul Mishra & Himanshu Mishra
Journal of Marketing Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this article, the authors propose that in the long term, a non-profit organization with a supportively-oriented positioning (e.g., for a cause) is likely to survive for longer and achieve greater donations compared to a non-profit with a combative orientation (e.g., fighting against something). To test this proposition, the authors adopted a three-pronged approach that (1) used publicly available financial data from non-profits' tax filings over a ten year period, (2) measured annual donor pledges from a field study with a registered non-profit organization and (3) examined actual donation behavior of participants in a longitudinal lab study. Moreover, this proposition is tested for donations of money as well as time. The authors consider different theoretical mechanisms that might be at work in causing the proposed effect, such as regulatory focus theory, inertia in giving, and the preponderance of supportive charities.
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Neural and cognitive characteristics of extraordinary altruists
Abigail Marsh et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Altruistic behavior improves the welfare of another individual while reducing the altruist's welfare. Humans' tendency to engage in altruistic behaviors is unevenly distributed across the population, and individual variation in altruistic tendencies may be genetically mediated. Although neural endophenotypes of heightened or extreme antisocial behavior tendencies have been identified in, for example, studies of psychopaths, little is known about the neural mechanisms that support heightened or extreme prosocial or altruistic tendencies. In this study, we used structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess a population of extraordinary altruists: altruistic kidney donors who volunteered to donate a kidney to a stranger. Such donations meet the most stringent definitions of altruism in that they represent an intentional behavior that incurs significant costs to the donor to benefit an anonymous, nonkin other. Functional imaging and behavioral tasks included face-emotion processing paradigms that reliably distinguish psychopathic individuals from controls. Here we show that extraordinary altruists can be distinguished from controls by their enhanced volume in right amygdala and enhanced responsiveness of this structure to fearful facial expressions, an effect that predicts superior perceptual sensitivity to these expressions. These results mirror the reduced amygdala volume and reduced responsiveness to fearful facial expressions observed in psychopathic individuals. Our results support the possibility of a neural basis for extraordinary altruism. We anticipate that these findings will expand the scope of research on biological mechanisms that promote altruistic behaviors to include neural mechanisms that support affective and social responsiveness.
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Hey Look at Me: The Effect of Giving Circles on Giving
Dean Karlan & Margaret McConnell
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, October 2014, Pages 402-412
Abstract:
We conduct a randomized field experiment with a Yale service club and find that the promise of public recognition increases giving. Some may claim that they give when offered public recognition in order to motivate others to give too, rather than for the more obvious expected private gain from increasing one's social standing. To tease apart these two theories, we also conduct a laboratory experiment with undergraduates. We find that patterns of giving are more consistent with a desire to improve social image than a purely altruistic desire to motivate others' contributions. We discuss the external validity of our lab findings for other settings.
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Visceral needs and donation decisions: Do people identify with suffering or with relief?
Inbal Harel & Tehila Kogut
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, January 2015, Pages 24-29
Abstract:
We examine the relations between people's experience of an ongoing visceral need (hunger) as well as the relief from that need and the willingness to help needy others actively experiencing the same or a different need. Results of two studies - one asking participants about the amount of time that had elapsed since they last ate and the other manipulating levels of hunger by asking people to fast before the experiment - reveal that overall, people tend to be more generous when satisfied than when actively experiencing a visceral need. When people experience an ongoing need, they tend to be less responsive to others' needs even when those needs match their own visceral state. However, experiencing partial relief from a recent visceral need, like eating something after a few hours of fasting, promotes the helping of others who are experiencing a corresponding need (hunger) but does not promote helping in general.
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Common Identity and the Voluntary Provision of Public Goods: An Experimental Investigation
Sherry Xin Li
University of Texas Working Paper, June 2014
Abstract:
We conduct a framed field experiment in two Dallas neighborhoods to examine how common identity affects individual contributions to local public goods. The participants' common identity is primed to make neighborhood membership salient before individuals make donations to local non-profit organizations. We find that the effect of the identity prime is sensitive to community context, increasing the likelihood of giving in the mid-income neighborhood, but decreasing giving in the poor neighborhood. The impact is statistically significant for women, but not for men, and is partially mediated by individuals' beliefs about whether others in their neighborhoods give.
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Aleksandr Kogan et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the present article, we introduce the quadratic vagal activity-prosociality hypothesis, a theoretical framework for understanding the vagus nerve's involvement in prosociality. We argue that vagus nerve activity supports prosocial behavior by regulating physiological systems that enable emotional expression, empathy for others' mental and emotional states, the regulation of one's own distress, and the experience of positive emotions. However, we contend that extremely high levels of vagal activity can be detrimental to prosociality. We present 3 studies providing support for our model, finding consistent evidence of a quadratic relationship between respiratory sinus arrhythmia - the degree to which the vagus nerve modulates the heart rate - and prosociality. Individual differences in vagal activity were quadratically related to prosocial traits (Study 1), prosocial emotions (Study 2), and outside ratings of prosociality by complete strangers (Study 3). Thus, too much or too little vagal activity appears to be detrimental to prosociality. The present article provides the 1st theoretical and empirical account of the nonlinear relationship between vagal activity and prosociality.
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Charlene Kalenkoski
Review of Economics of the Household, September 2014, Pages 547-563
Abstract:
This paper examines whether receipt of public or private assistance is associated with recipients' own generosity in the form of formal and informal volunteering. Using matched data from the 2007-2011 American Time Use Survey and the Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey, this paper finds that receipt of private assistance from friends and relatives is negatively associated with the time women spend caring for non-household adults and the time men spend caring for non-household children. Receipt of public assistance is found to be negatively associated with men's care of non-household adults. No associations are found between either type of assistance and time spent volunteering for a formal organization.
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Cooperation and conflict: Field experiments in Northern Ireland
Antonio Silva & Ruth Mace
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Science, 7 October 2014
Abstract:
The idea that cohesive groups, in which individuals help each other, have a competitive advantage over groups composed of selfish individuals has been widely suggested as an explanation for the evolution of cooperation in humans. Recent theoretical models propose the coevolution of parochial altruism and intergroup conflict, when in-group altruism and out-group hostility contribute to the group's success in these conflicts. However, the few empirical attempts to test this hypothesis do not use natural groups and conflate measures of in-group and unbiased cooperative behaviour. We conducted field experiments based on naturalistic measures of cooperation (school/charity donations and lost letters' returns) with two religious groups with an on-going history of conflict - Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. Conflict was associated with reduced donations to out-group schools and the return of out-group letters, but we found no evidence that it influences in-group cooperation. Rather, socio-economic status was the major determinant of cooperative behaviour. Our study presents a challenge to dominant perspectives on the origins of human cooperation, and has implications for initiatives aiming to promote conflict resolution and social cohesion.