Unobserved altruism: How self-signaling motivations and social benefits shape willingness to donate.

Public recognition is usually thought to motivate charitable giving. However, the current research identifies an important context in which the opposite occurs. We examine commonplace donation decisions involving modest amounts of money, which either take place in private, or are observed by others. We find robust evidence that public recognition can decrease donation likelihood. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this effect operates through a self-signaling mechanism: Public recognition creates ambiguity about whether the choice to donate is motivated by genuine altruism or the desire for recognition. As a result, public recognition can crowd out, or undermine, the self-signal of altruism, which in turn decreases donation rates. Finally, we test an important theoretical boundary, and show that when the social benefits associated with public recognition for donating are sufficiently valuable, the negative effects of public recognition attenuate. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Positive consequences of conflict on decision making: when a conflict mindset facilitates choice.

Much research has shown that conflict is aversive and leads to increased choice deferral. In contrast, we have proposed that conflict can be beneficial. Specifically, exposure to nonconscious goal conflict can activate a mindset (a set of cognitive procedures) that facilitates the systematic processing of information without triggering the associated costs, such as negative affect and stress. In a conflict mindset, people should be better able to make tradeoffs and resolve choice conflict. We tested this proposition in 4 experiments, and demonstrated that priming conflicting goals before a decision increases choice in domains unrelated to the primed conflict. We further demonstrated that increased choice occurs because people in a conflict mindset process choice information more systematically, and we rule out several alternative explanations for the results.