# Easy ‘prosocial’ acts give people license to say ‘I’ve done my bit already’

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2014/04/03/easy-prosocial-acts-give-people-license-say-ive-done-bit-already/
- Published: 2014-04-03T08:32:27+01:00
- Author: Howard Lake

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](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343445)
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.

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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](http://www.haas.berkeley.edu/groups/online_marketing/facultyCV/papers/nelson_prosocial.pdf).
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’.

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