Effects of Motivation for Prosocial Spending on Subsequent Positive Affect
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The present research compared the effects of empathy, moral elevation and a control condition as motivations for charitable donations on subsequent feelings of positive affect. Empathy and moral elevation have strong emotional aspects that provide the impetus for prosocial behavior. Empathy is defined as an other-oriented and congruent affective reaction that is concerned with the perceived well-being of another person (Batson, Ahmad, Lishner, 2009), while moral elevation is the warm, uplifting feeling people experience after witnessing moral beauty (Haidt, 2000). Empathy often induces negative feelings from seeing others in distress, while moral elevation often induces positive emotions. Thus, the initial difference in affective valence may have different effects on the positive affect experienced after acting prosocially. Furthermore, a number of personal characteristics are known to influence positive affect after prosocial behavior, such as personal values, internalized prosocial motivation and the satisfaction of basic psychological needs, namely autonomy, relatedness and competence. Therefore, the present study compared the effects of empathy and moral elevation, as well as a control condition, on individuals’ donations to charity and their subsequent positive affect while controlling for personal characteristics. Participants were 249 students from an introductory psychology class at the University of Toronto. The results suggested that participants in both the empathy and moral elevation conditions experienced significant decreases in positive affect following the induction of motivations, but that donating only helped restore positive affect to baseline measures in the moral elevation condition. Donating to charity was unable to restore participants to baseline measures in the empathy condition. The results also indicated that needs for competence and relatedness, internalized prosocial motivation and emotion regulation positively predicted positive affect after donation, while prosocial and pro-self values both negatively predicted positive affect after donation. As well, the association between affective empathy and positive affect after donating was negative for participants in the empathy condition, but positive for participants in the moral elevation condition. Similar differences by condition were found for internalized prosocial motivation and positive affect after donating. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".