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Morality Games

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The effectiveness of subconscious cues of observability points to a primary role for
reputations in our learned or evolved proclivities toward pro-social behavior. The
large impact of subtle cues of observability, however, calls into question alternative
explanations not based on reputations.

Explicit Requests. When we are asked directly for donations, we give more than if
we are not asked, even though no new information is conveyed by the request. In a
study of supermarket shoppers around Christmas time, researchers found that pass-
ersby were more likely to give to the Salvation Army if volunteers not only rang
their bell but explicitly asked for a donation (Andreoni, Rao, & Trachtman, 2011).
If our motive is to actually do good, or perhaps proximally to feel good by the act of
giving, we should not be impacted by an explicit request.

However, if we evolved or learned to give in order to gain rewards or avoid pun-
ishment as described above, then we ought to be more likely to give when, if we did
not give, it would be common knowledge that we had the option to give and chose
not to. The explicit request makes the denial common knowledge.

It is worth emphasizing that our evolved intuition to respond to explicit asks may
be (mis)applied to individual settings that lack social rewards. Imagine you are
approached by a Salvation Army volunteer in front of a store in a city where you are
visiting for one day only. A literal reading of the model would suggest that you
should be no more likely to respond to an explicit request. But it is more realistic to
expect that if your pro-social preferences were learned or evolved in repeated inter-
actions then applied to this new setting, you would respond in a way that is not
optimal for this particular setting and nonetheless give more when explicitly asked
(just as our preferences for sweet and fatty foods, which evolved in an environment
where food was scarce, lead us to overeat now that food is abundant).

Avoiding Situations in Which We Are Expected to Give. In the same supermarket
study, researchers discovered that shoppers were going out of their way to exit the
store through a side door, to avoid being asked for a contribution by the Salvation
Army volunteers. In another field experiment, those who were warned in advance
that a solicitor would come to the door asking for charitable donations were more
likely to not be home. The researchers estimated that among those who gave, 50 %
would have avoided being home if warned in advance of the solicitor’s time of
arrival (DellaVigna et al., 2012). In a laboratory analog, subjects who would have
otherwise given money in a $10 dictator game were willing to pay a dollar to keep
the remaining nine dollars and prevent the recipient from knowing that a dictator
game could have been played (Dana et al. 2006). If our motive were to have an
impact, we would not pay to avoid putting ourselves in a situation where we could
have such an impact. Likewise, if our motive were to feel good by giving, we would
not pay to avoid this feeling.

In contrast, if we evolved or learned to give in order to gain rewards or avoid
punishment, then we would pay to avoid situations where we are expected to give.
Again, this would be true even if, in this particular setting, we were unlikely to actually
be punished.

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