Business Commons^™

Mindset, Virtue Signaling And Volunteering, Corinne Novell, Steven Bauer, Alice Labban, Yingfan Zhu

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

Virtue signaling, or publicly showing off one’s good character or actions to others, has been studied in many contexts. This research expands on previous work and focuses on investigating the impact of fixed vs. growth mindsets on virtue signaling in a volunteering context. Mindsets, in the context of this research, are the beliefs people hold about the consistency of human’s personality as well as their moral characteristics. We hypothesize that given the different goal orientations of people with growth vs. fixed mindsets, the impact of obligatory virtue signaling on volunteer behavior will be stronger among people with a growth (vs. …