Management Sciences and Quantitative Methods Commons^™

To Give Or Not To Give? Choosing Chance Under Moral Conflict, Stephanie C. Lin, Taly Reich

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Although prior research suggests that people should not prefer random chance to determine their outcomes, we propose that in the context of prosocial requests, a contingent of people prefer to rely on chance. We argue that this is because they are conflicted between losing resources (e.g., time, money) and losing moral selfregard. Across five studies, in both choices with binary outcomes (whether to volunteer) and ranges of outcomes (how much to donate), some people preferred to be randomly assigned an outcome rather than to make their own choices. This did not negatively affect prosocial behavior in binary choices and improved …