The pitfalls of pay-to-play morality

Resumen

Psychologists often measure morality in dollars and cents. Economic games and charitable giving tasks frame giving money to strangers as moral and keeping money as selfish. This ‘pay-to-play’ paradigm has grown popular with the rise in online experiments. Here, we present data that trouble the interpretation of this paradigm in online settings. We invited US crowdworkers (N=1384) to make charitable decisions and measured not just their choices, but the motives and meanings they ascribed to those choices. We found that crowdworkers’ most common motive for keeping money was acute financial need (e.g., struggling to pay for medical care or groceries), and they did not interpret their decisions to keep money as selfish. Third-party judges (N=140) agreed that keeping money in economic tasks out of financial need was not selfish, and considered such tasks to be an unreasonable measure of altruism and selfishness. Further, third-parties believed it would be unpleasant for crowdworkers to be solicited to donate. Finally, we found that crowdworkers reporting financial need were unresponsive to standard interventions designed to boost generosity. Overall, these findings challenge the assumption that keeping money uniformly reflects selfishness, and raise ethical and practical considerations about how experimenters should define and measure morality.

Áreas y palabras clave

Cómo citar (APA 7)

Carlson, R. W., & Crockett, M. (2024). The pitfalls of pay-to-play morality. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ycdfz