Abstract
Scholars have argued that prosocial behavior produces positive emotions because it fulfills basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. These explanations have largely neglected morality, despite the fact that prosocial behaviors are widely considered to be moral. To determine whether seeing oneself as acting morally—moral self-appraisals—explained this effect, we conducted a preliminary measurement study followed by three online experiments that collectively include nearly 2000 respondents. A meta-analysis of our experimental results revealed that recalling or performing prosocial behavior has a small positive effect on positive emotion (β = 0.12, p < 0.001) that is partly attributable to the fact that prosocial acts encourage positive moral self-appraisals (β = 0.61, p = 0.004) and fulfill a psychological need for relatedness (β = 0.72, p = 0.015). Our results thus indicate that people feel good following prosocial behavior in part because it encourages them to view themselves as moral individuals.
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13 May 2022
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-021-00492-0
Notes
One might argue that even seemingly non-social or weakly social moral principles have social origins, as occurs in some accounts of the evolutionary origins of morality. However, this does not imply that these moral principles as practiced today fulfill psychological needs for relationships. Valuing hard work, for instance, might well place strain on relationships if it translates into long hours spent in focused isolation.
Moral self-appraisals are not tied to any particular type of morality, so positive feelings should occur when a person lives up to any moral principle, not just those associated with prosocial behavior (Prentice et al., 2020). We restrict ourselves to prosocial behavior here for consistency with past research but revisit this issue in the discussion.
Self-verification theories such as affect control theory or identity theory suggest that people’s emotions respond to perceptions of who one actually is.
The moral need fulfillment scale created by Prentice and colleagues (2019) would have been a viable alternative, but we did not become aware of this scale until after data for all studies had been collected.
Formal tests show that the difference between the donation coefficients in models for helpful and caring ratings is non-significant (p = 0.223), but that both of these coefficients are significantly larger than comparable coefficients in models for honest, fair, and moral ratings (all p ‘s < 0.001).
Conducting the same analysis using data from studies 2–4 returns comparable results. After performing or recalling a prosocial act, respondents view themselves primarily as helpful (all 3 studies) and caring (2 studies), occasionally as moral (1 study), and never as fair or honest. Code to generate these results is available as part of this paper’s replication materials.
Ko et al. (2019) show that recalling and performing prosocial acts (with or without recall) have roughly equivalent effects on well-being outcomes. Recall and reflection might be responsible for producing effects even when recall is not mandated by the experimental design—it might be that individuals naturally reflect on their actions without the need for further prompting. This, however, has not been demonstrated, so it remains to be seen whether prosocial acts can have a positive influence on well-being in the absence of opportunities for reflection.
The bootstrapped confidence interval for this difference is [-0.26, 0.10], indicating that indirect effects through moral self-appraisals and relatedness are not significantly different from one another. However, the analysis is almost certainly underpowered to detect this difference. A rough power simulation (included in the replication materials) suggests that with close to 200 respondents our power to detect a difference of 0.08 at p < 0.05 is less than 30%, and that achieving 80% power would require 800–900 respondents.
The confidence interval for moral self-appraisals is not symmetrical around the estimated indirect effect, indicating that the sampling distribution of this effect is non-normal.
People visit the grocery store for a variety of reasons, including for prosocial and self-indulgent reasons (the two comparison conditions). However, our review of the data suggests that this is not the case for most respondents. Further, either of these alternatives would elevate the average level of positive affect experienced by those in the grocery recall condition, making our analyses a conservative test of our study hypotheses.
MFQ30 subscale scores could range from 1–6. Those scoring above a 3.8 on the loyalty, authority, or purity subscales (i.e., the binding foundations) were randomly assigned to the following behavioral recall conditions, with probabilities of assignment shown in parentheses: loyalty (0.25), authority (0.25), purity (0.25), control (0.125), and self-indulgent purchase (0.125). All other respondents were assigned to conditions as follows: care (0.35), justice (0.35), control (0.15), and self-indulgent purchase (0.15). Simulations based on MFQ30 scores from a previous Amazon’s Mechanical Turk sample indicated that these probabilities (combined with the indicated cutoff score) would result in a roughly equal distribution of respondents across experimental conditions.
The rationale for this assignment strategy is that most people endorse care and justice-based morality, but only some endorse morality based on ingroup loyalty, respect for authority, and purity. Consequently, anyone would likely be able to recall instances of behaving in ways that express principles care or justice, but only some respondents would be able to authentically recall behaviors that express loyalty, authority, or purity. Because MFQ30 scores were used in assigning respondents to conditions, assignment to conditions was not completely random. However, adjusting for these scores in analyses eliminates this problem.
It might be argued that this task has only weak implications for prosociality because respondents did not choose to donate money, nor did they perform the donations themselves. However, respondents had full control over the amount of effort they invested in the task and understood that their effort would directly relate to benefits for the American Red Cross. We argue that this makes the act of trying (vs. coasting through or skipping the questions) a prosocial act. Further, even if respondents did view the task as less prosocial than otherwise might have been the case, this makes our study a conservative test of prosocial effects.
The average number of correct answers (out of 12) was 6 in the control condition (SD = 3.8), 5.6 in the reward condition (SD = 3.6), and 5.8 in the donation condition (SD = 3.6). All tests of differences between the number of correct answers by condition returned p-values greater than .20.
Our pre-registration plan also included a model showing that moral self-appraisals and psychological need fulfillment predicts positive affect, without including the donation or reward experimental conditions. This analysis does not fit with the narrative flow of our main text, but we report the results here for completeness: βMSA = 0.20, p < 0.001; βcomp = 0.26, p < 0.001; βauto = − 0.01, p = 0.735; βrelate = 0.121, p < 0.001.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Gordon Brett, Miloš Broćić, Soli Dubash, Jennifer Stellar, and members of the Morality Lab at the University of Toronto for helpful comments on previous versions of this manuscript. Data and code for all analyses are available at: https://osf.io/yc7eh/.
Funding
This project was supported by a Connaught New Researcher Award from the University of Toronto and a grant from the Research and Scholarly Activity Fund from the University of Toronto, Mississauga.
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Miles, A., Upenieks, L. Moral Self-Appraisals Explain Emotional Rewards of Prosocial Behavior. J Happiness Stud 23, 1793–1814 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-021-00434-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-021-00434-w