The impact of moral motives on economic decision-making

Abstract

To explore how “salient others” influence economic deci-sions, we tested the impact of moral motives on economicdecision-making in three relationally different situations:(a) anonymous social one-shot interactions, where individ-uals should draw on situational cues to infer informationabout how to interpret their relationship to a salient otherdue to the absence of other sources of social information,(b) non-anonymous social situations within an ongoinginteraction, in which the moral motive established in therelationship should override situational cues about moralmotives, and (c) anonymous non-social one-shot interac-tions, in which moral motives should not have an effectgiven the absence of a salient other. In an experiment (N= 94 participants), we varied these relationally differentdecision situations and the moral motive framing (unityvs. proportionality). As hypothesized, the two moralmotive framings influenced decision behavior, but only inthe anonymous social one-shot interaction. By replicatingthat moral motives matter in economic decision-makingand showing that people infer information about morallyacceptable behavior in anonymous social situations frommoral cues provided by the situation and from prior in-teractions in case of an ongoing relationship, we offer amoral-psychological explanation for why individuals decidedifferently in economic decision situations depending onthe relationality of the situation.

Keywords

• economic decisions
• moral motives
• tacit coordination
• decision design