Noble Honors Thesis UMICH 2022

*An honors thesis submitted to the University of Michigan* In the present study we examined if the desire to help distressed “partner,” in part to feel good, would detach people from an object they cared about and lead to engaging in prosocial behavior. We found that those in the pain condition – who were informed by their partner that they were distressed by part of the task that they both completed as part of the study – set more generous prices in an economic game that involved buyers and sellers. There was no significant difference between subjects’ price they were willing to sell the item for compared to the price they were willing to buy the item for. In the control condition – wherein the partner had a neutral reaction to the same task – between subjects analysis showed that there were significantly higher seller prices than buyer prices. Interestingly, while there were no significant differences between buyers and sellers across conditions, trait measures of empathy and shared distress were associated with more generous buyer prices in the pain condition, but not with more generous seller prices in the pain condition. We also found that within the pain condition measures of empathy and anticipating positive affect as a result of taking a prosocial behavior was associated with higher (more generous) buyer prices. Empathy, trait hoarding, and state distress each had an individual interaction for buyer price between conditions, suggesting that these are the factors that were driving the descriptive price difference in the buyers between the control and pain condition. Overall, this study confirms that a victim’s distress is a factor that facilitates prosocial behavior, and that people provide aid even if they cannot provide aid that is directly relevant to the victim’s distress. However, this study does not provide evidence that this urge has any significant impact on the decision to give an item to another person when they are attached to that item. Keywords: endowment effect, warm glow, prosocial behavior, altruism, empathy