Are monetary gifts negatively labeled? Material benefits and prosocial motivation evaluation

ABSTRACT

We examined whether people perceive prosocial actors’ prosocial motivations differently when prosocial actors gain monetary gifts and goods gifts. Across five studies, 1351 participants read different prosocial scenarios that depicted prosocial actors who gained either monetary or goods gifts. Then, they evaluated the prosocial motivations of the prosocial actors. Studies 1–5 consistently found that people perceived prosocial motivations to be less authentic when prosocial actors chose to receive monetary gifts compared with goods gifts. In addition, moral disgust and moral character evaluation mediated this effect (Studies 3–4). Moreover, the negative effect of monetary gifts on people’s perception of prosocial motivation further undermined their helping intention to prosocial actors (Study 5). Our research expanded the understanding of people’s perception of material gifts in prosocial behavior by proposing the model of monetary benefits aggravated tainted altruism. Besides, our findings provide insights into public policy and charity rules.

KEYWORDS:

• Prosocial motivation
• money
• goods
• moral character
• moral disgust

Acknowledgments

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Ethics Committee of the School of Psychology Shaanxi Normal University (HR 2020-05-001) and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards and written informed consent was obtained from all participants.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/ev6dm.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/ev6dm.

Notes

1. The α path refers to the effect of the independent variable on the mediator, and the β path refers to the effect of the mediator on the dependent variable

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Youth Innovation Team of Shaanxi Universities [2020084]; The Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [GK202201018]; Natural Science Basic Research Program of Shaanxi Province [2021JQ-308].

Notes on contributors

Huiqing Huang

Huiqing Huang is a graduate student at Shaanxi Normal University. Her work focuses on material gifts in prosocial behaviors.

Jiaxin Shi

Jiaxin Shi is a Ph.D. at The University of Hong Kong. His work focuses on moral emotion.

Hui Ma

Hui Ma is an undergraduate at Shaanxi Normal University. Her work focuses on prosocial motivation.

Xuhai Chen

Xuhai Chen is a professor at Shaanxi Normal University. His research focuses on emotion and social cognition.

Yangmei Luo

Yangmei Luo is a professor at Shaanxi Normal University. His research focuses on social cognition, well-being, and emotion.