When Moral Identity is Not Enough: Situational Moderators of Prosocial Behavior in Economic Exchange

• In Event: 41021 - Student Forum Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Roundtable 16: Open Topic

Abstract

Sociological theories of the moral identity posit that each individual holds themself to some set moral identity standard. The extent to which one views themself as being a moral person influences their behavior by pushing them to act in line with this self-perception. Moral identity has repeatedly been studied as a predictor of a variety of prosocial behaviors including volunteering, donating to charity, and cooperating in economic games, but findings have been mixed. Some studies show that moral identity is a significant predictor of prosocial behavior, while others have found no such relationship. The goal of the present work is to clarify this relationship by examining situational moderators such as structure of exchange, identity activation, and size of reward. We test these different facets of moral identity on prosocial behavior with two studies. Study 1 utilizes data from the Measuring Morality project (N = 1,519). Using logistic regression, we find that higher moral identity internalization is correlated with increased prosocial behavior, and that this effect is weaker when there is more incentive to behave selfishly. In Study 2, we collect data from workers on Prolific.com (N = 390). We find that moral identity does predict prosocial behavior in generalized exchange, but not in productive exchange or in a trust game. This effect does not appear to be moderated by whether or not the identity is subliminally primed via a word-completion task. Together, these findings advance our understanding of when moral identity influences prosocial choices by highlighting the importance of exchange structure and incentive magnitude as critical situational moderators.

Author

• Daniel Reich, Duke University