Prosocial behavior is common and often socially rewarded (e.g., via liking, status, and trust). Yet prior research has found that if actors themselves also benefit from their prosocial behavior, then they are morally derogated: They are evaluated as worse than purely selfish actors. This tainted-altruism effect has been explained by the use of different counterfactuals for the evaluation of prosocial and selfish actors. Here I propose social rewards protection theory , which explains why evaluators use these different counterfactuals in the first place: Social rewards are treated as being reserved for costly prosocial actions. Claiming such rewards without incurring costs seems like cheating and thus deserves moral derogation. Accordingly, being transparent about the action’s costs and benefits prevents such derogation. I conducted six experiments (five preregistered) with Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers in the United States and lab participants in Spain (total N = 4,732 adults). The findings provide support for the proposed functional explanation of tainted altruism, which also sheds light on related phenomena, such as overhead aversion and hypocrisy.
Andree Hartanto (Thu,) studied this question.