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Review of Philosophy and Psychology

, Volume 3, Issue 3, pp 325–334 | Cite as

Doing Good Leads to More Good: The Reinforcing Power of a Moral Self-Concept

  • Liane YoungEmail author
  • Alek Chakroff
  • Jessica Tom
Article
First Online:

Abstract

What is the role of self-concept in motivating moral behavior? On one account, when people are primed to perceive themselves as “do-gooders”, conscious access to this positive self-concept will reinforce good behavior. On an alternative account, when people are reminded that they have done their “good deed for the day”, they will feel licensed to behave worse. In the current study, when participants were asked to recall their own good deeds (positive self-concept), their subsequent charitable donations were nearly twice that of participants who recalled bad deeds, or recent conversation topics, consistent with an account of moral reinforcement. In addition, among participants reporting good deeds, those who did not note whether they were recognized or unrecognized by other people donated significantly more than participants who took note of others’ responses. In sum, when people are primed to see themselves as good people, who do good for goodness’ sake, not to obtain public credit, they may be motivated to do more good.

Keywords

Moral Behavior Actual Donation Charitable Donation Good Deed Moral Reinforcement 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Notes

Acknowledgments

We thank Daryl Cameron, Mike Norton, Dan Ariely, Chen-Bo Zhong, Doug Medin, Sonya Sachdeva, Joshua Knobe, and Rebecca Saxe for helpful discussion and comments. This project was made possible through the support of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

Supplementary material

13164_2012_111_MOESM1_ESM.doc (67 kb)
ESM 1 (DOC 67.0 kb)

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of PsychologyBoston CollegeChestnut HillUSA
  2. 2.Harvard University Department of Psychology33 Kirkland Street, CambridgeUSA

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