Morals and Emotions of Money
Nina Bandelj, Tyler Boston, Julia Elyachar, Julie Kim, Michael McBride, Zaibu Tufail & James Owen Weatherall
VIVIANA ZELIZER’S (1994) ARGUMENT about monetary earmarking laid bare the fact that, for most people, not all money is the same—homogenous and fungible. This is particularly obvious, she asserted, when we consider concrete monetary practices that people engage in, differentiating monies and their accompanying social relations. Indeed, a wealth of research followed this Zelizerian insight into the social meaning of money to show both that money is imbued with meaning and that people painstakingly negotiate what kinds of money or payments are appropriate for different kinds of social relations they partake in (Anteby 2010; Almeling 2011; Mears 2011; Biscotti et al. 2012; Haylett 2012).
We would be amiss to think that only sociologists have uncovered the meaning of money. Economists and psychologists have also countered the classical economics notion of money’s fungibility, mainly inspired by the work on mental accounting (Thaler 1999). Jonathan Morduch (in chapter 1 of this volume) offers suggestions about how this work differs from Zelizer’s emphasis on the role of social relations. Our chapter is also located in experimental work in psychology and behavioral economics, and our attempt is to add to the analysis of monetary differentiation by focusing on the role of morals and emotions. Based on the findings from an interdisciplinary investigation of charitable giving, we argue that moral judgments and emotional underpinnings are not discrete influences on how people think about and use money but thoroughly intertwined and reinforced by practice. In the last part of the chapter we spell out what our insights contribute to the interdisciplinary analysis of how people use money.
Mental Accounting and Money Valuations
The foregrounding of research in mental accounting comes from the groundbreaking work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Their prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky 1979), in contrast to consequentialist utility maximization, emphasizes that people are rather narrow in their focus of assessing alternative courses of action and that they use heuristics to do so. It seems that what matters to people are changes in wealth or welfare relative to a reference point, rather than absolute values. Experiments show that people who lose $100 will lose more satisfaction than those receiving a $100 windfall will gain. People also tend to avoid losses much more than they welcome gains, perhaps even twice as much (Tversky and Kahneman 1992).
Loss aversion connects with what Thaler (1980) named the “endowment effect,” or a tendency of people to value an object more highly if they possess it than they would value the same object if they did not possess it. This idea contradicts standard economic theory, as encapsulated in the Coase theorem, which states that a person’s willingness to pay for a good should be equal to his or her willingness to accept compensation to be deprived of the good. This theorem serves as a basic insight for economic consumer theory and indifference curves. However, Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler (1990) found important deviations from these expectations. They conducted an experiment, presenting individuals who possess an object with options to trade it for various amounts of cash. They compared their choices with those of subjects who did not possess the object but were given a series of choices between receiving the object and receiving various amounts of cash. The experimenters made the objective wealth position and possible choices of the two groups identical. Still, those participants who possessed the object were willing to sell it only at prices that were significantly higher than the prices at which sellers who did not possess the object identified its value. In fact, further elaboration by Loewenstein and Adler (1995) suggested that participants who are not endowed with an object fail to predict how painful it is to part with it once they possess it. This points to emotional underpinnings of economic choices, which we take up later in the chapter. First, however, we want to report on research that follows from prospect theory and concerns money, that of mental accounting.
The basic insight from mental accounting (Thaler 1999) is that money is labeled for specific purposes, such as paying for groceries, entertainment, and savings (Heath and Soll 1996). Such labeling or framing influences how money is actually spent. Forms of money also influence spending. For instance, people may be willing to bet more money if they use a credit card rather than cash. Labeling and categorizing money for specific spending purposes also takes place in organizations, which use budgeting to effectively allocate monetary resources, and in some cases, to improve performance (Merchant 1981; Sennewald and Baillie 2016). Moreover, the US government, for instance, makes distinctions between earned and unearned income for tax purposes. Following on this distinction, the Earned Income Tax Credit, which assists poor families in the United States, generally garners more support than other antipoverty programs because it signals that the working poor are not just receiving a windfall. The notion of earned income encompasses a moral judgment of superiority that unearned income lacks. Those working poor with earned income are therefore perceived as more deserving of receiving aid (Kornhauser 1994; Halpern-Meekin et al. 2015).
While labeling money both guides and impacts spending decisions, individuals also value money differently depending on when they obtain it. For instance, future monetary gains are perceived as less valuable than immediate gains (Prelec and Loewenstein 1998). In other words, individuals value immediate gains more than future gains, thus discounting future monetary values based on the time delay (Berns, Laibson, and Loewenstein 2007). In looking at defaulting behavior, Meier and Sprenger (2012) found that individual preferences for immediate gains over long-term ones predict their loan repayment behavior. Just as money has different meanings over time, monetary losses and gains, despite their equivalence in exchange value, also have different meanings such that investors frame losses and gains differently, and multiple stock selling is more likely when investors realize losses than when they realize gains (Lim 2006).
In brief, research on mental accounting has proliferated and opened up the terrain for considering first the place of morals and then emotions in monetary practices/differentiation. We review each of these bodies of research in turn.
Morals and Money
The differentiation of money, in terms of its sacred and secular value, deems attention. Psychologists and anthropologists find that individuals exposed to trade-offs between sacred (love, loyalty, honor) and secular (money-related) values find them incommensurable because of the lack of a common metric for such comparisons. Therefore, individuals respond to taboo trade-offs through moral cleansing (Shipton 1989) or by rationalization of the situation (Tetlock 2000). For instance, members of the Kenyan Luo farmers held ceremonies to cleanse “bitter” money earned from a taboo exchange that involved selling commodities such as tobacco and gold (Shipton 1989).
In addition to differentiating the various forms of money and money consumption, the source of money and its moral value warrant particular attention. In Stellar and Willer’s (2014) study, participants attached moral associations to money and perceived “immoral” money to have less purchasing power. The authors report on one study where students filled out up to seventy raffle tickets to win $50. To manipulate the “morality” of money, one group was told that Walmart, which was involved in lawsuits for exploitative labor practices, supplied the $50. This group filled out significantly fewer raffle tickets and assessed that they could buy less with that amount of money. In contrast, the findings were different for the group with “moral” money at their disposal, who were told that not Walmart, but Target, supplied the $50. In a second study, Stellar and Willer (2014) showed a positive relationship between accumulated past moral behavior and willingness to acquire morally tainted money. Participants were told that they could earn as much money as the number of the tasks they completed and given the information that Walmart, which was earning money through exploitative labor practices, funded the study. People who were given time to recall and write down instances where they acted morally completed more tasks than those who did not.
Other researchers have shown that morally tainted money is perceived to have lowered value. People attribute characteristics to money and categorize it as “dirty money,” such as that earned from criminal, illegitimate, or morally questionable activities, contrasting it to “clean money” (Shipton 1989). Psychologists find that when individuals acquire dirty money, they are likely compelled to transform it into clean money, such as making charitable contributions or spending it on a good cause in an attempt to morally cleanse the money (Tetlock et al. 2000). For instance, in an experiment where some individuals believed that they received money by participating in a study funded by a cigarette company, they used this “dirty money” for a more constructive purpose toward book purchases as opposed to spending on personal pleasure (Levav and McGraw 2009). On the other hand, offering monetary compensation to solicit charitable donations dampened charitable giving intentions and behavior (Mellström and Johannesson 2008; Newman and Shen 2012), possibly because it was considered morally questionable.
Interestingly, dirty and clean money, in the literal sense of putting blemishes on the notes as opposed to providing people with crisp new notes, influences consumer spending and behavior, as well. People’s spending generally increases with dirty, wrinkled, worn money because people seem to want to get rid of it. This may be due to the feelings of disgust that accompany possession of dirty money (Di Muro and Noseworthy 2013). In fact, researchers proposed that consumers engage in emotional accounting (Levav and McGraw 2009) in which they spend negatively tagged money on charitable expenditures to balance the negative emotions and feelings generated by its possession. More generally, emotions seem to play an important role in monetary behavior, and we review findings on this next.
Psychologists and behavioral economists have extensively studied the role of emotions in how people treat and use money. As perhaps expected, some of these studies show that emotions drive economically irrational decisions. For instance, Ben-Shakhar and colleagues (2007) investigated anger in a power-to-take experiment where individual B can take a certain portion of individual A’s money, and individual A can, in response, decide whether to get rid of a portion of the money and thus reduce individuals B’s take amount. Here, the most rational economic decision would be to not get rid of any money, given that any monetary destruction leaves less money on the table for individual A. However, when anger was induced, individuals consistently got rid of the money to reduce individual’s B take, making themselves worse off. Anger was also found to impact bargaining behavior in which bargainers who felt angry became more aggressive in the bargaining process (Forgas 1998).
Other emotions also carry over to various money decisions. Lerner, Small, and Loewenstein (2004) showed that relative to being in a neutral mood, experimentally induced feelings of disgust reduced the amount of money participants were willing to pay for certain objects. Other research shows that sadness can motivate changes to current situations by increasing monetary spending to possess more goods (Polman and Kim 2013), especially among more self-focused individuals (Cryder et al. 2008). Feeling gratitude, on the other hand, dampens the tendency of individuals to discount or devalue future gains over immediate gains. Gratitude increases the likelihood of making financial decisions that promote long-term economic gain (DeSteno 2009) and delaying immediate economic gratification for monetary rewards (DeSteno et al. 2014).
Manipulating a range of emotions, Harlé and Sanfey (2010) asked pairs of psychology undergraduates to play an ultimatum game, in which they would be asked to divide $10 between themselves, with one person making an offer of how to split and the other deciding whether to accept or reject the offer. If the other accepts, they both get the money based on the offer, and if the other rejects, nobody gets the money. Before they asked individuals to make ultimatum game decisions, the researchers evoked incidental moods—amusement, serenity, anger, and disgust—by having participants watch two movie clips, each lasting from three to five minutes. The results showed that acceptance rates of offers that followed the inducement of incidental negative emotions, anger and disgust in this case, were less likely accepted. Similarly, in Rick, Cryder, and Lowenstein’s (2008) experiment, tightwads and spendthrifts had to decide whether or not to purchase a variety of goods while listening to neutral or sad music. Tightwads spent more when sad than when in a neutral state, and spendthrifts spent less when sad than when in a neutral state. People also succumb to impact bias (Gilbert et al. 1998), overestimating the impact that a particular future event may have on them emotionally, such as the extent to which a future winning of a lottery is thought to increase the feelings of happiness. Durability bias leads people to overestimate the length or the intensity of future feeling states. In a study of consumer choices, Wood and Bettman (2007) found that people make their choices based on the estimated pleasure they will derive from a good, but they often overestimate this pleasure, as affective forecasting would predict. However, if people overestimate the duration of pleasure derived from a good, they are more likely to purchase it. This is something that marketers manipulate, together with eliciting emotions to increase consumerism (Bradford and Sherry 2013).
What about money and happiness? Research on this topic has proliferated lately, with contributions from Nobel laureates like Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton. The basic insight is that having more money does not straightforwardly bring more happiness, even if it may improve life satisfaction (Kahneman and Deaton 2010) or reduce feelings of sadness (Kushlev, Dunn, and Lucas 2015). The relationship between money and happiness, for individuals, may be moderated by their emotional stability (Soto and Luhmann 2013) and emotional intelligence (Engelberg and Sjöberg 2006), or by aspirational expectations and social comparisons (McBride 2010). It also depends on how the money is spent. For instance, people experience more lasting happiness when they spend money on experiences as opposed to commodities (Nicolao, Irwin, and Goodman 2009) because people remember the feeling of happiness from making purchases for experiences more so than material goods (Van Boven and Gilovich 2003), especially when spending money involves shared experiences with others (Caprariello and Reis 2013). Although having more wealth gives access to more experiences, Quoidbach and colleagues (2010) found that wealth decreases individual capacity to derive happiness from simple life pleasures. On the other hand, when reminded of monetary losses, people experience increased emotional distress (Zhou, Vohs, and Baumeister 2009).
The Interaction of Morals and Emotions in Charitable Giving of Money: An Empirical Case
One key area in which researchers have investigated the role of morals and emotions is charitable giving. Most of the studies have focused on one of these two elements, either the role of morals or emotions. Instead, we ask how morals and emotions interact in influencing money transfers. Moreover, we investigate how experience with money may shape moral responses when people’s motivations are not clearly formulated ahead of time, or when emotions are not manipulated in experiments but induced as a result of people’s personal experience.
Much existing experimental research uses dictator game experiments (Engel 2011) in both laboratory and natural settings to explore donor behaviors and motivations and offer practical advice to charitable organizations. Following in this vein of inquiry, we ran a version of the dictator game at our university, where undergraduate students were given one hundred tokens and then had an opportunity to choose to give the dollar value of these tokens (defined as $0.03 per token) to a charity.1 They were able to pick from four charities: Amnesty International, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Doctors Without Borders, and the American Cancer Society, and they could, of course, decide to not donate any money at all. We offered these choices because researchers have found these organizations to be among the top charities with which students are familiar (Carpenter, Connolly, and Meyers 2008) and also because they are oriented toward people, given that we wanted to examine prosocial orientations. All participants were made aware that experimenters sent the actual donation they selected to these charities after the experiment was completed. This means that participants operated with real money, not simply imaginary, experimental conditions. The unique set up of our experiment was that we asked students the same questions about donation at two different points in time, seven weeks apart. This helps us understand how giving to charities may evolve over time, rather than taking a snapshot of one decision. Moreover, we also asked students to provide open-ended answers (not prepared categories) to explain their choice of charity. This allowed us to investigate more directly motivations for giving.
The first round of the experiment was conducted with 196 students, who donated on average forty-eight tokens. Twenty of these students (10 percent) did not donate anything; the rest donated between one and one hundred tokens, with forty-two (21 percent) donating all of their tokens. In the second round, we suffered some attrition, so the total sample with information for both time points was 173 students.2 Out of these, thirty-seven (21 percent) did not donate anything; the average contribution was thirty-two tokens; and twenty-one (12 percent) donated all one hundred tokens. The gender breakdown was ninety-nine female and seventy-four male students, with different majors and years in school.
SELF-INTEREST AND GIVING
The instructions of the experiment stated: “You have now been given 100 tokens. You can choose to give the dollar value of some of the tokens to one of four charities listed below. The payment to the charity will be made anonymously on your behalf by the experimenter after today’s experiment session. Please select one of these charities: 1. Amnesty International, 2. United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 3. Doctors Without Borders, and 4. American Cancer Society. Please enter in the box below how many tokens you would like to give to the charity. You will keep the rest of the tokens for yourself.” All participants actually got the money equivalent of the tokens at the end of the experiment.
The language in the last part of the instructions was supposed to tap into the extent charitable giving was different from instrumentally selfish behavior.3 In fact, research identifies altruism and utility as two central motivations for donating to charitable organizations. Altruism is believed to motivate most charitable giving. Economists, however, point out that impure altruism exists and that donors also benefit from making monetary gifts to organizations. Notably, “warm glow,” which describes the positive feelings experienced from donating, has been identified to motivate giving to improve a giver’s utility (Andreoni 1989; Harbaugh 1998; Mayo and Tinsley 2009; Null 2011). While we could not investigate warm glow directly, we did ask students to express agreement (a Likert scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree) with three statements, which were supposed to tap their prosocial orientations. One statement was: “Self-interest governs my economic choices.” The second statement was: “Doing things for others when they need help is important to me.” The third statement, triangulating the other two, was: “Helping others without being paid is not something that people should feel they have to do.”
What we found is that those who agreed with the statement that self-interest governs their economic choices were less likely to donate. In addition, those who donated more were also more likely to agree that helping others is important to them. Also, those who believed that people should help others even without being paid donated more of the tokens we gave them. When we ran regression analyses and considered other predictors of charitable giving (gender, parental education, major, year in school, ethnicity, whether individuals work or volunteer outside of school), the one of the three self-assessed statements that was statistically significant and negatively related to charity was agreement on whether self-interest guides one’s economic choices, again with those expressing stronger agreement donating significantly less.4
GENDER AND CHARITY
Previous research has established that one of the central determinants of charitable giving is gender. Women generally make more monetary donations and volunteer more time to charitable organizations than men (Simmons and Emanuele 2007; Kamas, Preston, and Baum 2008; Mesch et al. 2011; Leslie, Snyder, and Glomb 2013) though this may change when high costs are involved (Cox and Deck 2006). Differences in degrees of empathy and prosocial behavior may explain the gender gap in giving (Winterich, Mittal, and Ross 2009). Willer, Wimer, and Owens (2015) show that women feel more empathy toward the disadvantaged because of the social roles they fulfill, ones that tend to have more nurturing, communal, and caring characteristics (Eagly and Wood 1991). Women and men, additionally, give differently across various types of organizations, with women donating more to education (Rooney, Brown, and Mesch 2007), health care (Einolf 2011, Mesch et al. 2011), human services (Leslie, Snyder, and Glomb 2013) and poverty relief organizations (Willer, Wimer, and Owens 2015). This research contributes to the broader analysis of gendered money, including finding that mothers spend more on children than fathers do (Thomas 1990; Zelizer 2011) and that men respond differently to monetary incentive structures than women do (Ridinger and McBride 2015).
In our experiments, we also found that female students donated more than male students. The gender effects were particularly pronounced for those who decided to donate all of the money they were given. While twenty-one students in the second trial donated all one hundred tokens they received, seventeen of them were female. On the other hand, thirty-seven students chose to donate none of tokens that they were given. Of these, twenty-three were males, and fourteen were females.
The majority of those who donated all of their tokens picked either UNICEF or the American Cancer Society. All but one who donated everything to UNICEF were females, and the reasons provided mostly emphasized that doing good for children is important. One student wrote, “Children are the future and they all deserve a chance at being something in the world.” Another one said, “I have a soft spot for children.” Yet another offered, “It was difficult to choose between charities but ultimately I went with UNICEF because it is a fund that helps children around the world.” This emphasis on gender-traditional concerns, such as that of females for children, indicating a female nurturing role, was rather surprising to us, given that the average age of the respondents was twenty and that these young women do not have children of their own. Still, this is consistent with previous research finding that women donate when they feel empathy (Willer, Wimer, and Owens 2015) and for causes that highlight their social roles with more nurturing characteristics (Eagly and Wood 1991), such as taking care of children.
The gender pattern was very different for those who decided to donate all of their tokens to the American Cancer Society. There were no clear gender patterns among these donors, and the reasons emphasized most were personal and emotional. One female student wrote, “There is a heavy incidence of cancer in both my immediate and extended family, all of which thus far has been the sole result of the death of said individuals. The research and funding of cancer research thus is important to me.” A male student expressed a similar sentiment: “I have a relative who was recently diagnosed with some form of cancer. This cause and foundation holds a special place in my heart and if I could donate more of my tokens I definitely would.” These findings suggest that gender-typical behavior, whereby women feel more empathy, can be overcome when people have personal experience with hardship or grieving, such as incidence of cancer in their family. In those cases, empathy crosses gender boundaries. Also, it shows that the practical dimension of giving based on evocative personal experience plays an important role in linking emotions to money.
MORAL WORTH OF, AND EMOTIONAL CONNECTION TO, CHARITABLE RECIPIENTS
Existing research highlights moral worth of the charity recipient as an important factor for explaining charitable giving behavior, and it pinpoints attribution theory as a possible underlying mechanism. Findings from empirical studies show that individuals’ charitable behavior is different when moral considerations are made (Winterich, Mittal, and Ross 2009), such that individuals assess the moral worthiness of charity recipients, evaluating how deserving they are (Mayo and Tinsley 2009), and donate more money to those whom they perceive as more deserving (Fong and Luttmer 2011; Fong and Oberholzer-Gee 2011). Psychologists cite attribution theory to account for this assessment of moral worth, especially in giving to poverty relief charities (Fong and Luttmer 2011). Donors to poverty relief organizations assess whether charity recipients experience poverty because of external circumstances or personal shortcomings such as laziness, and donate more to individuals who are perceived to have little responsibility for their circumstances.
We did find a similar trend in our experiments. UNICEF was among the most popular choices, and especially among those who exhibited consistent behavior in both sessions, most picked UNICEF. It is likely that our experiment participants, unless they had an emotionally resonant personal connection with cancer or a cancer patient, were quick to empathize with vulnerable children and to consider them morally worthy recipients. Only two people who made consistent charity choices and donated the same amount picked Amnesty International, which was also at the bottom of the list for the sample as a whole. We have to recognize that for students in our experiment, political engagement across borders is not a likely personal experience nor are students in our sample generally politically very active. At the same time, it is difficult for these students to assess the moral worth of those that Amnesty International may benefit. Interestingly, even Doctors Without Borders was not picked often, despite a consideration that those in need of medical help may be considered morally worthy of donation. However, given that other charity options were offered, choosing to donate for children and cancer patients one knows had more emotional and moral resonance for our participant profile than did foreigners in need of political or medical help.
The association of different motivations with different charities was also evident in the broader sample. While 53 of 173 students picked UNICEF, 24 of those mentioned as their reason something about children (for example, that children need help, or are least able to help themselves, or that they are our future.) Of these twenty-four, only seven were male students, sixteen were females, and one did not answer the gender question). Eleven of those who picked UNICEF gave a recognition/reputation reason, saying they knew or recognized the organization, or that this organization has a good reputation. Seven students listed previous experience with this organization, five mentioned that UNICEF fights for a good cause, and six gave other reasons or said there was no particular reason for their choice.
As concerns the donations to the American Cancer Society, however, the great majority related that their choice was based on the fact that they had some personal connection to cancer patients or victims. Out of 173 students, 52 chose this organization, and 37 of those who donated to it (71 percent) listed a personal connection to a cancer patient. Sixteen of these were male, and twenty were females (and one who preferred not to answer the gender question). It is clear, then, that the great majority picked this charity because of a personal, emotionally resonant experience, and this was rather gender neutral. Among the rest, seven listed that this organization had a good cause as motivation for their giving, four that they knew the organization, and the remaining four wrote that they picked it for no particular reason.
PRACTICAL AND LEARNED CHARITABLE BEHAVIOR
While we found that self-assessed self-interest and gender were the two most important predictors of charitable giving in regression models (controlling for ethnicity/race, year in school, major, and parental education), these effects were attenuated when we added a variable, which indicated whether these students decided to contribute money to charity in the experiment run seven weeks prior. In the end, the strongest predictor of whether students contributed was whether they had contributed in the past, which points to the practical and experiential nature of money use that few experiments are able to detect because of their one-time nature. Still, our finding is very consistent with Zelizer’s (1994, 2012) view that people establish practices in which they deal with money, rather than simply relying on imbued values or morals.
Students’ choices were not very consistent across two time periods, even if only seven weeks apart. Only 36 of 173 students donated the same amount to the same charity in both weeks. However, those who previously donated were more likely to donate again, regardless of their gender and stated self-interest. This suggests that the strong effect of previous donation has less to do with strong established preferences than it does with a practical inclination to do something that one has done before.
Previous research also finds that those from lower classes donate a larger portion of their money than the wealthier class (Mayo and Tinsley 2009; Piff et al. 2010), largely arguing that these individuals have “a greater commitment to egalitarian values and feelings of compassion” (Piff et al. 2010: 1). However, in our study we were able to take into account individuals’ prosocial orientations, and we show that those whose parents have higher education (a measure of socioeconomic background relevant for students) more readily disagree with the statement that helping others in need without pay is not something that one should be compelled to do. Moreover, college students with parents from higher socioeconomic backgrounds tend to donate more. It may be that these students feel more economically secure, so it is easier to part with extra money given to them for donation. Or, this finding may signal that donating, especially for young people without income-earning jobs may also be linked to expected behaviors taught to children in families with greater cultural capital—and therefore something considered to be culturally appropriate—rather than a reflection of one’s deep commitment to egalitarian values.
Conclusion: The Experiential Underpinnings of Emotions and Morals of Money
To advance the scholarship about the role of morals and emotions in how people use money, we ran a series of experiments to gauge students’ donations to charities with money they are given by the experimenter. Our experiment differed from previous ones in that it followed the same group at two different points in time and also asked for open-ended answers to the question about why people donated. Our results are consistent with previous research, which finds that stimulating emotional reactions, making personal connections, or demonstrating emotional and familial utility helps to elicit donations (Sargeant, Ford, and West 2006). Female students tended to donate more to UNICEF and listed concern about children as the main motivating factor. These students do not have children of their own, but they can consider the moral worth of kids in need and probably also empathize with it emotionally. It is possible that if we offered other charity choices that allowed students to relate to them as they did to the American Cancer Society, we could induce more empathy and therefore donations also among men. Our results show that personal experience, which is emotionally resonant, can serve as a central motivation for charitable giving. Moreover, for those without clear preferences, simply deciding to give once before made a significant difference in the likelihood for giving a second time, regardless of gender and perceived self-interest. As such, our findings point to the intertwined nature of morals, emotions, and experience in shaping charitable giving.
Conceptually, researchers often try to delineate morals, emotions, and experience into discrete factors of consideration. Instead, our research suggests that considering these reasons for charitable giving in tandem may prove especially fruitful. In fact, some research and theorizing argues for an emotional basis of moral judgment (Prinz 2006). For instance, a study by Sanfey et al. (2003) measured brain activity as subjects played an ultimatum game. In this game, participant A is given a sum of money and asked to divide it with participant B. Researchers found that when B considered the offer unfair, she or he had brain activity in areas associated with emotion. A moral evaluation was thoroughly intertwined with an emotional reaction.
Moreover, it is important to bring experimental work into conversation with research in sociology that points to the practical underpinnings of values, which are not always clearly articulated (Swidler 1986). In addition, people seem to use cultural understandings both as motives for action as well as practical strategies of action when motives are not easily identifiable ahead of time (Vaisey 2009). While much research on motivations for charitable giving assumes that people have clear preferences, it is likely that often people do not know exactly what they want and for what reason, but do it nevertheless. They may respond emotionally, out of habit, or improvise (Bandelj 2009, 2016), and these processes of action need to be brought centrally to our understanding of how people use money, including gift giving and charity.
Overall, our findings suggest that we should think about the moral judgments and emotional underpinning not necessarily as discrete influences on how people think about and use money but as thoroughly intertwined, and, as reinforced in, and sometimes even emergent from, practice. This theoretical orientation necessitates interdisciplinary collaborations in the experimental study of the use of money and in survey or ethnographic research trying to assess money motivations. The division of disciplinary labor among economists, psychologists, and sociologists has been important to substantiate nonfungibility from different theoretical and methodological perspectives, against a classical economic assumption of neutral money. Nevertheless, we can now move beyond disproving fungibility and focusing on how individual dispositions and social circumstances, together, shape the use of money. Here we come full circle to Zelizer’s (2012) insistence that people are nimble in negotiating their social ties, monetary transfers, and media of exchange, and that they do so in practice. Practical money matters have to do with individual morals and intentions, cultural understandings, and emotional experiences related to concrete social interactions in which they find themselves. Understanding what happens with money when it is in people’s hands would benefit not from converting each salient factor into a discrete, measurable, experimental condition but by finding research sites, and theoretical orientations, that allow us to consider them jointly.
1. All experiments were conducted in the Social Sciences Experimental Lab at the University of California, Irvine. Undergraduates were the subjects, recruited through an economic anthropology class, as well as from the lab’s subject pool. There were no significant differences in findings resulting from the two different methods of recruitment.
2. There was no correlation between attrition and charitable donation, so this did not bias our sample at time point 2.
3. We write “instrumentally selfish” to distinguish between altruism conducted for selfish reasons—because of warm glow, for instance—which we could call value-rational behavior, and selfish behavior that increases material wealth of subjects (i.e., instrumental behavior).
4. Admittedly, our experimental conditions cannot take into account the fact that some donors may act self-interestedly when donating (Glazer and Konrad 1996; Ellingsen and Johannesson 2011), but this is largely because they are making donations to well-known, well-publicized organizations that publicly share information about large contributions. This augments status recognition (Sell 1997) and garners social approval from others (Izuma, Saito, and Sadato 2010).
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