Many of us measure altruism and selfishness in dollars and cents. If you want to know how selfless someone is—the logic goes—add up how much money they give to strangers or charity. New work w/ @mollycrockett complicates this picture:. 🧵.

RT @that_adammorris: Are we “strangers to ourselves”? Classic theories say people have limited insight into how they decide. Our new paper….

RT @chazfirestone: It's a privilege to engage with an expert like @JoHenrich on a question as important and foundational as the role of cul….

If you are heading to APS in May and/or study motivation, you should check out SSM (5/22 in DC). The lineup is *stacked* this year, and super interdisciplinary. Submissions are due tomorrow (Feb 1)!.

RT @iamlindachang: In our new @PNASNews paper, across 21 experiments with 23,000+ participants, we identify a critical distortion that shap….

RT @freemanjb: Excited to announce that Columbia's Department of Psychology is hiring a tenure-track faculty member! Emphasis on multi-meth….

RT @APA_Journals: New research in Motivation Science discusses interventions that promote learning from #failure to overcome emotional and….

RT @gershbrain: Just to put this in perspective, the cost of running Open Mind for a year is roughly the total APCs collected by Nature Com….

RT @carlsonr_: Many of us measure altruism and selfishness in dollars and cents. If you want to know how selfless someone is—the logic goes….

RT @CynthiaSCWang: It’s that time of year, and the Dispute Resolution Research Center @DRRC_Kellogg at @KelloggSchool is inviting applicati….

Grateful to @mollycrockett for being a continued source of support on a project that challenges our own assumptions and methods. We’re excited for feedback. Lastly: I am on the academic job market this year!. Thanks for reading 🙏. 12/12.

Implication: Testing prosocial interventions with online workers (often a precursor to field studies) may not only be applying moral pressure in the wrong place, but could lead us to *miss* the effect our interventions could have on people who have the means to donate. 11/12.

The goal for many of us studying prosociality is not merely to describe human altruism, but to boost it. Subjective motives are crucial here too: People in financial need show no change at all in generosity following a nudge intervention that typically boosts donating. 10/12

Many of us (including myself & @mollycrockett) have long adopted a pay-to-play model of morality, where we ask participants to give away money to prove their moral worth. These findings raise questions about this model. Here’s a more practical consideration:. 9/12.

We got a second opinion: We asked a new group of third-party ‘judges’ to evaluate these motive reports. 88% of judges believed they were witnessing genuine financial need. Even more, most agreed that it wasn’t selfish at all for these folks to be keeping the money. 8/12.

Yet it is harder to doubt the content of their free responses. Online workers claim to need the money for groceries, rent, or medication. Some even say they’re at risk of becoming unhoused. Our participants see the money in these ‘games’ as a way to stay afloat. 7/12

When we look at reported incomes: those reporting financial need have much lower incomes than other participants—often incomes bordering the US poverty line. But can we trust self-reported income? Perhaps they’re fudging those numbers as well to justify their selfishness. 6/12.

Half of our online sample said they wanted to keep the money out of financial need, and these were the same folks who deemed it morally acceptable to do so. The first time I shared these findings outside my lab, an audience member quickly asked: what if they’re lying?. 5/12

In coding these reports, we see a wide variety of motives for keeping the money (e.g., to donate elsewhere, to reach a saving goal, or simply out of self-interest). But one type of motive dominates all others: financial need. 4/12

Yet in some recent online studies, we posed a simple question to our participants that we seldom ask: Why? We let our participants explain in their own words why they wanted to keep the money rather than give it to charity. 3/12.

When we ask online workers what’s fair in a dictator game with a charity, their views often directly clash with how we define selfishness as experimenters: Many of them deem it fair to keep all the money for themselves. We often dismiss this as motivated reasoning. 2/12