The Price of Conscience: A Panel Study of Moral Self-Regulation through Charitable Giving

• In Event: Joint Roundtables: Social Psychology Section and Sociology of Emotions Section
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 1 - Morality, Collective Energy, & Prosocial Behavior

Abstract

Aristotle theorized that moral action begets further moral action: “We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.” Today, whether virtuous acts prompt future ethical behavior remains an open empirical question. A competing body of research in psychology highlights an opposing dynamic: Individuals often engage in “moral self-regulation,” a process in which past good behavior is used to justify later transgressions, while past transgressions motivate later good deeds. However, existing evidence for these dynamics comes primarily from short-term experiments and vignettes rather than real-world behavior.
Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we estimate first-difference and fixed-effects models to test whether changes in morally contentious behaviors over time coincide with changes in a prosocial practice: charitable giving. We organize the analysis around three domains of moral tension: alcohol use and religious giving (both among the religiously affiliated overall and within prohibitionist traditions), luxury expenditures and poverty-oriented giving, and gasoline consumption and environmental giving (among environmentalists). Results indicate that charitable donations shift in response to personal transgressions, particularly when the behavior violates explicit normative boundaries within an individual’s specific moral community. When individuals increase their participation in morally contentious practices, they simultaneously increase the frequency and size of their donations to causes that offset those activities. Robust across alternative specifications, the findings are more consistent with a logic of moral self-regulation than generalized moral consistency.

Authors

• Ian Rowe-Nicholls, Pennsylvania State University

• Mu-Tse "Anderson" Lee, Pennsylvania State University