When Virtue Becomes Obligation: Competitive Morality and the Overproduction of Prosocial Behavior

• In Event: 4148 - Norms, Culture, and Cooperation

Abstract

To successfully operate in low-resource or authoritarian settings, organizations often must motivate members to pursue collective aims often at the expense of material self-interest. Although research has focused on identifying mechanisms that produce prosocial behavior, this study explores the neglected possibility that organizations struggle equally with the overproduction of prosocial behavior. In living with and interviewing teachers over a five-month period, I describe how prosocial behavior was overproduced at the “Sunshine School,” a Chinese nonprofit organization serving low-income students migrating from rural to urban areas. I find that teachers endowed their work with moral significance through perceptions of students as helpless victims of government policies. Furthermore, the principal framed status competitions around moral virtue rather than competence. Thus, when teachers volunteered for additional duties, other teachers felt that unwillingness to participate would threaten their moral status, fueling runaway cycles of moral competition that culminated in high rates of teacher burnout. Leveraging this ethnographic case, I develop a theory of when prosocial behavior is likely to be overproduced: 1) when prosocial behavior is seen as related to an individual’s moral worth, and 2) individuals’ levels of prosocial behavior are evaluated relative to their peers. In such settings, the same mechanisms that enable organizations to accomplish collective aims may also lead to cycles of competitive morality that are unsustainable for individuals. By exploring when individual interests are overly constrained, this study invites further work to explore a more nuanced dilemma: one that is not merely about producing prosocial behavior but how to balance production and overproduction.

Author

• James Y. Chu, Stanford University