The pitfalls of pay-to-play morality

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 interpretation of this paradigm. 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 crowdworkers’ most common motive for keeping money was acute financial need (e.g., struggling to pay for medical care or groceries). These individuals reported significantly lower incomes, and did not view their decisions to keep money as selfish. Third-party judges (N=140) agreed that keeping money in economic tasks out of financial need was not selfish, and considered such tasks to be an unreasonable measure of altruism and selfishness. Finally, we found that crowdworkers reporting financial need were unresponsive to standard interventions designed to motivate generosity. 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.