The pitfalls of pay-to-play morality

Abstract

Morality is often measured in dollars and cents. Economic games and charitable giving tasks frame giving money to strangers as moral and keeping money as selfish. This ‘pay-to-play’ paradigm has grown popular with the rise of online experiments, yet its underlying assumptions often go untested. Here, we present data that complicate the use of this paradigm for measuring moral behavior in online settings. We invited US crowdworkers (N=1384) to make charitable decisions and measured not just their choices, but the motives and meanings they ascribed to those choices. We found that nearly half of crowdworkers (47%) reported keeping money out of acute financial need (e.g., struggling to pay for housing, medical care, or groceries). These individuals reported significantly lower incomes, and did not view their decisions to keep the money as unfair. Third-party judges (N=140) agreed that keeping money in economic tasks out of financial need was not selfish at all. Finally, we found that crowdworkers reporting financial need were unresponsive to standard social norm interventions that increased giving among the rest of our sample. Overall, these findings challenge the assumption that keeping money uniformly reflects selfishness, and raise ethical and practical questions about how experimenters should define, measure, and motivate moral behavior.