Easy ‘prosocial’ acts give people license to say ‘I’ve done my bit already’
Howard Lake | 3 April 2014 | News
Allowing people to carry out “prosocial” acts with little cost to themselves could give them the ‘moral licence’ to avoid making bigger contributions later on.
At the JustGiving-sponsored Fundraising Insights conference last week, Alex Imas, associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the USA, summarised two pieces of recent research he had conducted.
The first experiment looked at how people engaged in prosocial incentives schemes of the type that might be offered by employers, such as lunchtime keep fit classes or recycling schemes, which often offered people some kind of incentive for taking part. Sometimes, the incentive can be that money will be donated to charity.
Imas’s research found that people were more likely to work harder in schemes that gave money to charity only if it was a relatively low amount, but if it was a much higher incentive, they worked harder if it benefitted them directly rather than charity.
The second area of research summarised by Imas looked at whether acting prosocially affected people’s future ethical behavior. This found that people who made an initial costly contribution were more likely to act with ‘moral consistency’ and behave more prosocially in the future.
But if they made a low cost contribution, they used this to give them the ‘moral license’ to avoid acting prosocially in the future – in effect to say that they had ‘already done their bit’.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.