The pitfalls of pay-to-play morality

Psychologists often measure morality in dollars and cents. Economic games andcharitable giving tasks frame giving money to strangers as moral and keeping money asselfish. This ‘pay-to-play’ paradigm has grown popular with the rise in online experiments.Here, we present data that trouble the interpretation of this paradigm in online settings. Weinvited US crowdworkers (N=1384) to make charitable decisions and measured not justtheir choices, but the motives and meanings they ascribed to those choices. We found thatcrowdworkers’ most common motive for keeping money was acute financial need (e.g.,struggling to pay for medical care or groceries), and they did not interpret their decisions tokeep money as selfish. Third-party judges (N=140) agreed that keeping money in economictasks out of financial need was not selfish, and considered such tasks to be anunreasonable measure of altruism and selfishness. Further, third-parties believed it wouldbe unpleasant for crowdworkers to be solicited to donate. Finally, we found thatcrowdworkers reporting financial need were unresponsive to standard interventionsdesigned to boost generosity. Overall, these findings challenge the assumption that keepingmoney uniformly reflects selfishness, and raise ethical and practical considerations abouthow experimenters should define and measure morality.