Do you remember? Prosocial behavior declines in memory-based decisions

Many economic decisions affect other stakeholders, yet information about these consequences is often not directly available at the moment of choice and must instead be recalled from memory. Here, three studies examine how memory processes shape social behavior and whether their behavioral effects are better explained by motivated memory or rational accounts of memory allocation. In Study 1, participants made binary dictator-game decisions in which the consequences for themselves and another player were represented by pictures whose monetary outcomes had to be learned and later recalled from memory. Compared with the control condition in which all outcome information was available on the decision screen, participants chose less prosocially when decisions relied on memory. Studies 2 and 3 showed that prosocial choice in memory-based dictator games did not reliably increase either when strategic encoding of outcomes was made impossible or when accurate recall was monetarily incentivized. A structural model with a social utility function indicates that memory-based decisions reduce the weight placed on the other player’s outcome in unequal allocations that are advantageous to the dictator. Across choices, recall patterns, structural modeling, and individual differences, the results are most consistent with motivated forgetting during decision making: participants appear to selectively fail to retrieve information about social consequences when this information would make selfish choices harder to justify. These findings suggest that making consequences for other stakeholders salient at the moment of choice can promote socially beneficial behavior.