UC Irvine

In 2022, charitable giving accounted for roughly 2% of the gross domestic product in the U.S., with 64% of donations being made by individuals. Despite the significant impact of this industry on the economy, little is known about the socio-affective constructs that mediate charitable giving. In this dissertation, I assess the influences of a range of motivational and cognitive states and traits on real-world charity donations. In Chapter 1, I demonstrate that individual differences in narcissism and approval-seeking predict decisions to make public vs. anonymous donations, and that these relationships are modulated by social information about the decisions made by other donors. In Chapter 2, I use a real-time interactive “advisor-decider” task, in which advice given by one participant results in an onerous workload for another participant, to show that self-conscious affect based on performance in one domain shapes decisions to engage in charitable giving in an unrelated domain. Advisors that performed at or worse than the norm, in terms of giving incorrect advice, made more frequent subsequent charity donations: Intriguingly, when advisors were given social information about their performance relative to the norm, this pattern was reversed, such that advisors that performed worse than the norm made less frequent donations. Finally, in Chapter 3, I explored whether a recently demonstrated preference for instrumental divergence – the degree to which voluntary actions differ with respect to their outcome distributions – depends on whether monetary decision outcomes are kept for oneself or donated to a charity of one’s choice. I found that the intrinsic motivation associated with greater instrumental control applies selectively to decisions that earn money for oneself – no such preference was observed for decisions that earned money for charities. Collectively, these studies serve to better characterize the social, cognitive, and motivational processes that mediate prosocial behavior.