Altruistic decisions are influenced by the allocation of monetary incentives in a pain-sharing game

Ye-Seul Lee, Hyun-Seo Song, Hackjin Kim and Younbyoung Chae

PLOS ONE, 2019, vol. 14, issue 3, 1-16

Abstract: Background: Altruistic behavior is essential to the sustainability of society, but our current understanding of its underlying motivation is limited. In addition to the intrinsic motives to help others, based on empathy, extrinsic motives such as monetary incentives and social reputation influence prosociality. The purpose of this study was to examine the underlying motivations of prosocial behavior under constant or increasing extrinsic motivation settings. Methods: An experimental task, Altruistic Pain Sharing, was developed in which the participants were asked to share the other participants’ pain. In the session with monetary incentives, the incentives were given either constantly (CONSTANT condition) or proportionally (INCREASING condition), to the amount of shared pain. In addition, monetary incentives were not provided in the NO session. The participants experienced different amounts of mechanical pain at the beginning of the task and chose the number of pain stimulations to share, based on their experiences. Results: Compared to the NO session, the INCREASING session exhibited a rise in the mean of shared pain, but not the CONSTANT session. Furthermore, there was a distinct tendency to receive less pain than the other participant in the CONSTANT session, and a tendency to receive more pain than the other participant in the INCREASING session. Conclusion: Prosocial behavior was influenced by the presence, as well as the form, of the extrinsic monetary incentives. Our study shows that rewards incentivize individuals to demonstrate a higher level of prosocial behavior, implying that prosocial behavior is itself a mixture of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, and that an effectively designed rewards system may function to enhance prosocial behavior.

Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0213104 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 13104&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0213104

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0213104

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().