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Running head: BIASED BENEVOLENCE

Biased Benevolence: The Perceived of Effective Across Social Distance

Authors: Kyle Fiore , Dylan Campbell, Brendan Gaesser*

Affiliations:

Department of , University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, NY *Correspondence to: Brendan Gaesser [email protected] 1400 Washington Ave., Albany, NY 12222 585-750-1614

Total word count: 11,573 2 BIASED BENEVOLENCE

Abstract

Is altruism always morally , or is the morality of altruism fundamentally shaped by the social opportunity costs that often accompany helping decisions? Across four studies, we reveal that in cases of realistic tradeoffs in social distance for gains in welfare where helping socially distant others necessitates not helping socially closer others with the same resources, helping is deemed as less morally acceptable. Making helping decisions at a cost to socially closer others also negatively affects judgments of relationship quality (Study 2) and in turn, decreases cooperative behavior with the helper (Study 3). Ruling out an alternative explanation of physical distance accounting for the effects in Studies 1-3, social distance continued to impact moral acceptability when physical distance across social targets was matched (Study 4). These findings reveal that attempts to decrease biases in helping may have previously unconsidered consequences for moral judgments, relationships, and .

Keywords: , , inequality, morality, social distance 3 BIASED BENEVOLENCE Biased Benevolence: The Perceived Morality of Effective Altruism Across Social Distance

It makes no moral difference whether the I can help is a neighbor’s child ten yards

from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away.

, 2015

We couldn’t escape the brutal conclusion that - in our world today - some lives are seen

as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves, ‘This can’t be true. But if it is

true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving.’

– Bill Gates, 2005

The nature of altruistic behavior is changing. have a deeper capacity to help others in need than ever before, not necessarily because of advancements in morality and reasoning (Bloom, 2016; Lecky, 1869; Pinker, 2012; Singer, 1981), but rather because of changes in technology, medicine, and economics. In an increasingly connected, medically advanced, and wealth-imbalanced world, more can be done to improve the lives of others with fewer resources and less effort than ever before. We frequently help family, friends, and neighbors, but perhaps most remarkable is the fact that we are now able to just as readily help distant strangers extraordinary hardship and even death. Indeed, for those in affluent societies, resources can do precisely the “most good” (i.e., produce the greatest welfare gains in life and livelihood) in the most cost-effective manner when donated to socially distant others living in extreme poverty (GiveWell, 2019), a central to the growing social and of effective altruism (Singer, 2015, 2016). Explicit in this rationale is that people should strive to minimize the extent to which they take personal relationships and social closeness into account when deciding where to donate resources because doing so would not be valuing human life equally, violating the moral of fairness and failing to 4 BIASED BENEVOLENCE maximize the impact of helping others (Bloom, 2016; Prinz, 2011; Singer, 2015).

Yet in practice, people do take how close and connected they feel with others into account when deciding who and how much to help; charitable giving tends to increase as social distance decreases (Goeree et al., 2010; James & Zagefka, 2017; Strombach et al., 2014) and subjectively preferred, socially closer charities tend to be opted for over socially distant, welfare- maximizing ones (Berman et al., 2018). Effective altruism recognizes that these in helping close others exist and advocates that should try to do more to distribute resources equitably. Despite the fact that choosing to donate to socially distant others may actually accomplish more in terms of gains in welfare, the fact that these decisions simultaneously involve not helping one’s family, friends, community members, or countrypeople by omission may lead to more negative moral evaluations of socially distant helpers versus socially close helpers and their actions. This raises the intriguing question of whether doing the

“most good” is always perceived as morally better, or whether the moral evaluation of altruism fundamentally shifts according to the social opportunity costs that accompany decisions to help others in need.

In general, helping behaviors tend to be evaluated as morally praiseworthy (Barasch et al., 2014; Bostyn & Roets, 2016; Carlson & Zaki, 2018; Pizarro et al., 2003) and helpful actions lead to positive of the helper’s (Landy & Uhlmann, 2018; Piazza et al., 2014). Such evaluations influence social preferences, and from a young age, individuals like and prefer to interact with people who help as opposed to hinder others in need (Hamlin et al.,

2007; Jordan et al., 2016; Judd et al., 2005; Olson & Spelke, 2008; Sommerville et al., 2013).

When outcome metrics for various charitable options are made explicit and directly comparable to individuals (i.e., joint evaluations; Hsee, 1996), people are more likely to select the welfare- 5 BIASED BENEVOLENCE maximizing option (Caviola et al., 2014; Kogut & Ritov, 2005a, 2005b). Thus, when helping behaviors are assessed independently of who is receiving help (i.e., the social relationship between the donor and recipient of help), people judge helping as morally positive and appear to prefer options that maximize gains in welfare.

But what about when maximizing welfare gains entails favoring socially distant over socially closer others, as in the types of donation decisions advocated by effective altruism?

Research in and has established that people tend to care for and empathize more easily with those who are socially closer and more similar to them

(Cikara et al., 2011; Masten et al., 2010; Preston & Waal, 2002) and that these preferences extend to a variety of helping behaviors observed in lab and real-world contexts (De Dreu et al.,

2010; Hein et al., 2010; Levine et al., 2005; Preston & Ritter, 2013). For example, when choosing to share economic resources within their social networks, people tend to share fewer resources with more distant recipients (Fareri et al., 2012; Goeree et al., 2010; Hoffman et al.,

1996), indicating that people the gains of others less with increasing social distance (Jones

& Rachlin, 2006; Strombach et al., 2014; Vekaria et al., 2017).

Complementary ultimate and proximate theoretical perspectives can help make sense of such preferences. At the ultimate level, the fact that humans lived in relatively small, close-knit groups throughout much of their evolutionary history is to have created selective pressures favoring within-group cooperation and between-group hostility (Choi & Bowles, 2007;

Greene, 2014). Additionally, evolutionary theory would predict a particularly strong sense of attachment and obligation towards kin (Hamilton, 1963; Preston & de Waal, 2002). This in turn could potentially account for a number of proximate explanations that have been offered for ingroup favoritism including the importance of one’s groups to their -esteem and identity 6 BIASED BENEVOLENCE (Tajfel, 1974), the higher levels of and obligation we feel towards socially close versus distant others (Cikara et al., 2014; Hughes, 2017; McManus et al., 2020) and the fact that loyalty to close others appears to be a central moral concern in across the globe (Graham et al.,

2013). To the extent that people’s moral judgments of others’ behavior align with these preferences, helping socially close others may be perceived as more morally acceptable than helping socially distant others despite the fact that this choice does not maximize welfare gains for those in need. Thus, maximizing one’s impact when donating may come with a personal social cost for donors.

Related emerging research on moral judgments of impartial concern and altruism (i.e., impartial beneficence; Everett & Kahane, 2020; Kahane et al., 2018) offers conflicting results.

On the one hand, several studies have shown that those who choose to help strangers and more socially distant others instead of close friends and family are perceived to be morally worse and less trustworthy than those who do the opposite, even when helping the socially distant other would produce more substantial welfare gains (e.g., building houses for Habitat for Humanity instead of spending time with one’s mother; Hughes, 2017; McManus et al., 2020). These effects appear to be driven by the perceived obligations of helpers towards close friends and family

(Hughes, 2017; McManus et al., 2020), and reverse in direction when helpers were in roles where greater impartiality would be expected (e.g., in a professor-student relationship; McManus et al., 2020).

In contrast, however, our own independent reanalysis of moral wrongness ratings from data sets posted by Everett et al. to the Open Science Framework (OSF, Everett et al., 2018) revealed that, whereas impartial actions were consistently seen as morally worse than partial actions in the domain of instrumental harm (e.g., killing one person to save five), this was not 7 BIASED BENEVOLENCE true for impartial helping behaviors; the actions of impartial and partial helpers were consistently seen as similarly morally acceptable (we note that these patterns differ somewhat for the moral character ratings Everett et al. focus on in the main text of their [2018] manuscript). Relatedly,

Everett and colleagues demonstrated that people were equally willing to cooperate with impartial and partial helpers in an economic game despite rating impartial helpers as less loyal and worse friends and spouses (Everett et al., 2018). Moreover, recent work suggests variability between individuals exists on dimensions such as the extent to which they value impartial, welfare- maximizing behavior (Everett & Kahane, 2020; Kahane et al., 2018) and the extent to which they see all humanity as their ingroup (i.e., identification with all humanity; McFarland et al., 2012), highlighting the value of incorporating individual difference perspectives into research on helping across social distances.

Thus, based on the extant literature it is unclear at this point whether people would perceive the actions of those who prioritize welfare-maximizing causes as morally worse on average than those who prioritize close others in their helping. Moreover, to our knowledge, while past work has tended to focus on the importance of obligations to close relationship partners (i.e., helping family and friends versus distant strangers; e.g., Hughes, 2017; McManus et al., 2020), no study has systematically manipulated social distance between donors and recipients of help in a graded fashion in order to more precisely characterize the effects of social distance on moral judgments.

The present research investigates the moral significance and social consequences of tradeoffs in social distance for welfare gains advocated by effective altruism, systematically manipulating the relationship between the donor and recipient of help (family, friends, community members, countrypeople, strangers from another country, non-human animals) in 8 BIASED BENEVOLENCE vignettes adapted directly from the philosophical literature on effective altruism. Across four experiments in addition to a pilot study and supplemental experiment, we found that moral judgments of altruism are robustly moderated by social distance. In Studies 1-4, we show that helping socially distant others becomes systematically less morally acceptable as the person in need not being helped with those same resources becomes socially closer to the person helping.

Moreover, individuals who help socially distant others are actually evaluated as worse people

(i.e., worse family members, friends, community member, and countrypeople; Study 2) and are rejected more often as cooperation partners (Study 3). In Study 4, when manipulating both the social and physical distance between the donor and potential recipient of help, we find that social distance continues to exert an effect when physical distance is accounted for.

In addition to examining moral perceptions and social consequences of altruistic tradeoffs, we also investigate whether individual differences in moral values (i.e., the Moral

Foundations Questionnaire [MFQ; Graham et al., 2011]), deontological versus utilitarian thinking (i.e., the Footbridge [Greene et al., 2001]), and the extent to which participants see all humans as their ingroup (i.e., the Identification with All Humanity Scale

[IWAHs; McFarland et al., 2012]) modulate these moral perceptions, finding that participants with higher IWAHs scores consistently report more positive moral judgments of socially distant altruism than participants with lower IWAHs scores (Experiments 1-4 and Supplemental

Experiment). On the whole, these findings reveal that doing the “most good” can actually come to be perceived as less moral and suggest that attempts to decrease social biases in altruism sometimes advanced in psychology, , and philanthropy may have unintended consequences on moral judgments and ultimately, cooperative behavior.

Experiment 1 9 BIASED BENEVOLENCE In a Pilot Study (see “Pilot Study” in Supplemental Materials), we found that third-party moral judgments of both altruism directed at socially distant targets (i.e., when someone donates limited resources to distant strangers in need) and altruism directed at socially close targets (i.e., when someone donates limited resources to family members, friends, community members or fellow country people in need) are largely positive when social opportunity costs are not made explicit (i.e., when donating to one person is not framed as coming at the exclusion of donating to another). Experiment 1 made these inherent tradeoffs transparent by directly manipulating the social distance between the donor and the socially close entity in need that did not receive aid and by stating clearly that the donor decided to help the socially distant cause instead of the socially close cause in each vignette.

Additionally, we incorporated several individual difference measures that we believed might moderate effects of social distance on moral judgments. First, the Moral Foundations

Questionnaire (MFQ; Graham et al., 2011), which measures the extent to which people prioritize five different domains in their moral judgments: harm, fairness, loyalty, respect for , and purity/sanctity. In particular, we were interested in exploring individual variability in harm and fairness (which might predict a lower prioritization of social distance in judgments about helping others in need) and loyalty (which might predict greater preferences for helping socially close others). Second, the Identification With All Humanity Scale (IWAHs; McFarland et al.,

2012), which measures the extent to which participants feel an overlapping sense of identity with and concern for all humans (and thus, might predict smaller effects of social distance on moral judgments of helping). Finally, we included a standard measure of utilitarian versus deontological - the footbridge variant of the trolley dilemma (Greene et al., 10 BIASED BENEVOLENCE 2001) - anticipating that preferences for welfare-maximizing altruism might be associated with a tendency toward more utilitarian (“greater good”) preferences in moral judgment.

Method

Participants. We an a priori stopping point for data collection of N=100 usable cases in the Pilot Study, Experiments 1 and 2 and the Supplemental Experiment (see Supplemental

Materials for description of the Supplemental Experiment). We recruited 119 total participants from MTurk in exchange for a small payment, 19 of whom were excluded for failing at least one attention check. Thus, our final sample included N=100 participants (mean age=35.26,

SD=10.39, 41.2% female). However, three additional subjects were excluded from the primary analysis on a basis of missing data in one of the experimental conditions, leaving behind a sample size of N=97 cases analyzed in the repeated-measures ANOVA. A sensitivity analysis revealed that a sample size of N=97 participants would be reliably able to detect an effect size of dz=.33 with 90% power for any within-subjects comparison that assumes a two-tailed test and an alpha level of .05. 11 BIASED BENEVOLENCE Procedures. In a single-factor (Social Distance: chimpanzee1, countryperson, community member, friend, family member) within-subjects design, participants in Experiment 1 read five vignettes describing a hypothetical moral dilemma in which an actor had to decide between donating money to a socially distant cause involving a greater gain in welfare (a cause that would save multiple or many lives overseas) or a socially closer cause involving a lesser gain in welfare

(a cause that would save one or few lives of socially closer entities). The actors’ decisions were held constant, such that the actor donated money to the more socially distant cause in all five of the vignettes instead of donating money to the socially close cause. Representing the independent variable in Experiment 1, the social closeness to the actor of the helping beneficiary who was denied money was manipulated within-subjects in correspondence with the above listed levels.

The presentation order of vignettes was randomized between subjects to guard against order effects in the Pilot Study, Experiments 1, 2 and 4, and the Supplemental Experiment. Data and vignettes for all studies in the manuscript are available online at the following link: https://osf.io/ cv3nj/?view_only=55af006cdc024f92b1b9d2a630c33334.

Measures.

Moral Acceptability of Actor’s Decision. After reading each vignette, participants reported the moral acceptability of the decision made by the actor in the vignette on a 9-point scale (“To what extent was it morally acceptable for the actor to donate to [socially distant cause] instead of [socially close cause]?”; 1=completely unacceptable to 9=completely acceptable).

1A fifth condition in which the helping beneficiary who was denied money was a chimpanzee was also included in Experiments 1, 2 and 4 and the Supplemental Experiment as a control condition, representing an entity even more socially distant than a stranger in another country. To more comprehensively chart movement in the perceived moral acceptability of donating limited resources to a stranger in another country as a gradient of the social distance from the donor of the entity whom is denied money as a consequence (i.e., the social opportunity cost), it felt important to include at least one social opportunity cost entity at a social distance greater than that of the charitable recipient. For the sake of word limit constraints and clarity of interpretation, results pertaining to the “chimpanzee” condition have been moved to Supplemental Materials for all Experiments. 12 BIASED BENEVOLENCE Measurement of Moral Values. Participants’ moral values in each of the five foundations identified by (caring, fairness, loyalty, authority and purity) were measured using the 30-item MFQ (Graham et al., 2011). Participants reported the extent to which they agreed with each of these items on a 6-point scale (0=strongly disagree to

5=strongly agree).

Identification with All of Humanity. Participants’ identification with all of humanity

(i.e., the extent to which participants see all humans everywhere as their ingroup) was measured using the Identification With All Humanity Scale (IWAHs; McFarland, Webb, & Brown, 2012).

This scale contains nine, three-part items, each of which begin with a prompt (e.g., “How much do you identify with [that is, feel a part of, feel toward, have concern for] each of the following”) and subsequently call for ratings pertaining to three groups (“People in my community”, “Americans”, and “All humans everywhere”) on 5-point scales (1=not at all to

5=very much).

Moral Acceptability of Utilitarian Behavior in the Footbridge Dilemma. For exploratory purposes, third-party moral judgments of a utilitarian decision made in the footbridge variant of the trolley dilemma (i.e., the decision to kill one person by pushing him from a footbridge onto trolley tracks below in order to stop a runaway trolley from killing five unsuspecting others in its path; Greene et al., 2001) were measured at the end of the Pilot Study and Experiments 1 and 2 on a 9-point scale (1= completely unacceptable to 9= completely acceptable).

Results

Scoring and Reliability of Composite Measures. 13 BIASED BENEVOLENCE MFQ. We scored the MFQ according to the SPSS syntax posted on the Moral

Foundations Theory website (moralfoundations.org, accessed 2020), which composes an average score for each of the five moral foundations for each participant. However, the MFQ contains two subscales (i.e., moral relevance and moral judgments) within each foundation. To be diligent, we conducted two sets of correlations between scores on the MFQ and moral judgments of socially distant altruism: one set of correlations utilizing average scores within each of the five foundations (according to the syntax posted on the website) and another set utilizing average scores across the two subscales within each of the five foundations. Because the same moral foundations tracked with moral judgments of socially distant altruism when subscales were considered individually and when the two subscales were averaged within each foundation, the results of the analyses in which the subscales were averaged are included in the main text of the manuscript. The results of the analyses in which the two subscales were considered independently can be found in Supplemental Materials.

The internal consistency of the items which compose each moral foundation was also assessed: Care (Chronbach’s ɑ= .72), Fairness (Chronbach’s ɑ= .58), Loyalty (Chronbach’s

ɑ= .44), Authority (Chronbach’s ɑ= .81), and Purity (Chronbach’s ɑ= .88). The reliability of the

Care, Fairness, and Loyalty foundations was notably low, and thus the interpretability of findings related to these three foundations is limited (see below). 14 BIASED BENEVOLENCE IWAHs. Three IWAHs composite scores can be computed from this scale. The raw score is simply a sum of the nine items on the “all humans everywhere” subscale. However, analyses including this raw score alone provide problematic results. Because the three scores derived from this scale are often positively correlated with one another (those who identify with all of humanity tend to also identify with community members and countrypeople as well), the authors of the scale suggest that the composite scores pertaining to the “people in my community” and “Americans” subscales are used as statistical controls whenever performing any analyses on the “all humans everywhere” subscale (McFarland et al., 2012). This procedure was performed whenever correlations between IWAHs scores and moral acceptability ratings were examined in any study in this manuscript. However, zero-order correlations between scores on the IWAH subscales and moral acceptability ratings across Experiments 1-4 can be found in

Supplemental Materials. The internal consistency of items on the IWAHs was high in

Experiment 1, Chronbach’s ɑ= .86.

Helping Decision on Judgments of Moral Acceptability. As was the case in the Pilot

Study, socially distant altruism was viewed as fairly morally acceptable on average (M = 6.82,

SD = 1.81), being rated well above the midpoint of 5 on the 9-point scale. However, socially distant altruistic action was rated as systematically less morally acceptable when it was committed instead of helping socially closer others.

A repeated-measures ANOVA revealed a significant omnibus effect of the social distance from the actor of the entity who did not receive help on participants’ judgments of moral

2 acceptability, F(4, 384) = 34.24, p < .001, η p = .26 (see Figure 1; see Supplemental Materials for means and standard deviations). Post-hoc comparisons with Bonferroni adjustments were used to further decompose this omnibus effect. These comparisons revealed that ratings of moral 15 BIASED BENEVOLENCE acceptability of an actor helping multiple or many distant entities (more socially distant others involving greater gains in welfare) were lower when the entity not receiving help was one or a few family members as compared to countrypeople, t(96) = 7.02, p < .001, dz= .71 or community members, t(96) = 5.39, p < .001, dz= .55. Further, the moral acceptability of helping multiple or many distant entities was also lower when the entity not receiving help was one or a few friends as compared to countrypeople, t(96) = 6.91, p < .001, dz= .70 or community members, t(96) =

4.68, p < .001, dz= .48. However, not helping one or a few family members and not helping one or a few friends were judged to be similarly morally acceptable, t(96) = 1.27, p = 1.00, dz= .13.

Thus, while the perceived moral acceptability of socially distant altruism was well above the midpoint on average, moral acceptability approached the midpoint of the scale as the alternative entity in need who did not receive help became socially closer to the actor in the vignettes. This pattern of results was replicated in a separate study which also measured individual differences in moral expansiveness (MES; Crimston et al., 2016; see Supplemental Experiment).

Moral Values and Moral Acceptability. Zero-order correlations between scores on the

MFQ (Graham et al., 2011) and participants’ moral acceptability scores in each of the experimental conditions revealed that participants’ moral values tracked with their moral judgments of socially distant altruism (Table 1). Intrigued by these correlations from Experiment

1, we wanted to do our due diligence to ensure that they were on solid footing, so we ran an additional study attempting to replicate them (see Supplemental Experiment in Supplemental

Materials2). The Supplemental Experiment replicated all of the findings from Experiment 1, except for those involving MFQ. The discrepancies involving MFQ might be a product of the sample size being too small to detect genuine but smaller associations (note the low internal

22 Note that Supplemental Experiment is not the same experiment as Pilot Study, but a separate experiment representing a direct replication of the pivotal findings from Experiment 1. These two studies are labeled in accordance with these titles in Supplemental Materials. 16 BIASED BENEVOLENCE consistency of the Care, Fairness and Loyalty subscales in Table 1), or they could be a product of an absence of a genuine association. Either way, informed by the data from our internal replication efforts, we chose to further investigate the more consistent and robust pattern of results of moral judgements of altruism shifting across levels of social distance and their associations with IWAHs scores in subsequent experiments.

Identification with all Humanity and Moral Acceptability. A pattern emerged between moral acceptability scores in each of the experimental conditions and the extent to which participants identified with all humanity. Participants who scored higher on IWAHs provided greater endorsements (i.e., more positive moral acceptability scores) of actors’ socially distant altruistic actions when the opportunity cost of engaging in such action was helping a family member, friend, or a person from the same country as the actor (Table 2). In sum, these findings demonstrate that those who identify more strongly with all of humanity put less importance on the social relationship between the helper and the recipient of his or her aid when morally evaluating other people’s mutually exclusive helping decisions.

Moral Acceptability of Utilitarian Behavior in the Footbridge Dilemma. No significant correlations between the moral acceptability of utilitarian decisions in the footbridge dilemma and moral judgments of socially distant altruism were found in any experimental conditions in the Pilot Study or Experiments 1-2 (see Supplemental Materials for correlations between these variables across the three experiments).

Experiment 2

Although both socially distant and socially close altruism are seen as highly moral when social opportunity costs are not made explicit (Pilot Study), in Experiment 1 (and subsequently replicated in the Supplemental Experiment), we found that the perceived morality of socially 17 BIASED BENEVOLENCE distant altruism systematically diminishes as the entity not receiving aid becomes socially closer to the donor, providing evidence that moral judgements of altruism track with tradeoffs in social distance. Further, we found that moral judgments of socially distant altruism become more positive as participants tend to identify more with all of humanity.

However, because the decision of the actor in the vignette was not manipulated in

Experiment 1 nor the Supplemental Experiment (i.e., in these two experiments, the actor in the vignette always chose to donate money to the socially distant cause and deny money to the socially close cause), no study in this series thus far has allowed for comparisons between moral perceptions of decisions to help socially distant others versus socially closer others within particular levels of the social distance independent variable. Thus, it could still be the case that moral perceptions of socially distant altruism, while moderated by social distance, are more positive than moral perceptions of socially close altruism at particular levels of social distance

(e.g., when altruistic tradeoffs involve decisions between donating to countrypeople versus distant strangers) and less positive at others (e.g., when altruistic tradeoffs involve decisions between donating to family members versus distant strangers).

Experiment 2 addressed this gap by manipulating not only the social distance between donors and potential targets of their aid, but also the decisions made by the donors (i.e., whether the donor helps the more socially distant targets or the socially closer targets). By manipulating the donor’s decision, Experiment 2 allowed us to identify whether socially close or socially distant altruism is perceived as more morally acceptable in a manner that is sensitive to varying degrees of social distance. Informed by prior research demonstrating that social consequences can accompany impartial helping decisions (e.g., Everett et al., 2018) and more broadly that moral appraisals of people’s helping decisions impact subsequent cooperation and relationships 18 BIASED BENEVOLENCE with others (e.g., Jordan et al., 2016; Sommerville et al., 2013), Experiment 2 also measured whether socially distant altruists are subject to negative social evaluations (e.g., whether socially distant altruists are seen as worse countrypeople, community members, friends and family members and are less desired as social partners than socially close altruists) as a result of their donation decisions. 19 BIASED BENEVOLENCE Method

Participants. We recruited N=139 participants from MTurk in exchange for a small payment, 39 of whom were excluded for failing attention checks. Thus, our final sample consisted of N=100 participants (mean age=37.10, SD=10.58, 38.0% female). A sensitivity analysis revealed that a sample size of N=100 participants would be reliably able to detect an effect size of dz=.33 with 90% power for any within-subjects comparison that assumes a two- tailed test and an alpha level of .05.

Procedures. In a 2 (Decision: the donor gives money to the socially distant cause, the donor gives money to the socially closer cause) X 5 (Social Distance: chimpanzee, countryperson, community member, friend, family member) X 2 (Story Type: story 1, story 2) within-subjects design, participants in Experiment 2 read a total of 20 vignettes of the same style as those presented in Experiment 1 (and the Supplemental Experiment). Here, however, the actor’s decision was manipulated such that he or she decided to donate to the distant cause in ten trials and the close cause in ten trials. Again, the social closeness to the actor of the potential recipient pertaining to the socially closer cause was manipulated within subjects corresponding to the five levels listed above. Further, two story types were used as blueprints to compose the vignettes in order to increase the generalizability of our results. We determined that moral acceptability ratings and social judgments were strongly correlated and not significantly different between the two story types (see Supplemental Materials), thus we collapsed these two dependent variables across story types for our primary and secondary analyses.

Measures.

Moral Acceptability of Actor’s Decision. Participants were again asked to report the moral acceptability of the donor’s decision in each of the 20 trials. 20 BIASED BENEVOLENCE Perceived Affiliation Between Donor and Socially Close Recipient. Following each recording of the moral acceptability measure, participants reported, in response to the donor’s helping decision, the perceived affiliation between the donor in each vignette and the group of socially close recipients he or she had the opportunity to donate to. The perceived affiliation measure was composed of three individual items assessing the extent to which the donor liked, valued, and felt connected to the entity in question and the entity included in each item pertained to the entity included in the accompanying vignette (e.g., “The person in the story likes his or her countrymen,” “The person in the story values his or her community members,” “The person in the story feels connected to his or her friends.”). Scores from the three items reflected the extent to which participants agreed with each statement on a 7-point scale (1=strongly disagree to

7=strongly agree) and were averaged together when composing the perceived affiliation variable, such that each participant received 20 perceived affiliation scores, each one corresponding to one of the 20 trials.

Judgements of Donor’s Character. Next, participants reported a character judgment of the donor in each vignette in response to the donor’s helping decision. One item addressing the extent to which the donor is a good countryperson, community member, friend or family member composed this variable for each vignette, and the entity included in the item (e.g., countryperson, community member, friend, or family member) pertained to the socially close entity detailed in the corresponding vignette (e.g., “The person in the story is a good community member,” “The person in the story is a good friend.”). Participants indicated their agreement with this item on a

1=strongly disagree to 7=strongly agree scale for each vignette, excluding the four which included a chimpanzee as the socially close entity. Previous related work on impartial beneficence has found that people who endorse impartial helping are rated as worse partners in 21 BIASED BENEVOLENCE close relationships (e.g., friends and spouses), but were evaluated as equally suitable bosses and more suitable political leaders (Everett et al., 2018). However, whether this difference was driven by increasing social distance and contact or something specific to the responsibilities of leadership was unclear. The current design enabled us to evaluate a potential effect of social distance on relationship character judgments as a consequence of altruism.

Desire to Affiliate with Donor. Finally, participants recorded the extent to which they would want to affiliate with the donor as a countryperson, community member, friend, or family member as a result of the donor’s decision in each vignette. Once again, the entity included in this item pertained to the socially close entity detailed in the corresponding vignette (e.g., “I would want the person in the story as a countryman,” “I would want the person in the story as a community member.”). Participants indicated their agreement with this item on a 1=strongly disagree to 7=strongly agree scale for each vignette, excluding the four which included a chimpanzee as the entity who was denied money.

Identification with All of Humanity. Again, in Experiment 2, the IWAHs was used to measure participants’ identification with all of humanity.

Results

Data Reduction and Reliability of Composite Measures. 22 BIASED BENEVOLENCE Social Judgments. An Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) with Oblimin rotation

(see Supplemental Materials) revealed that perceived affiliation, character judgment, and to affiliate items loaded onto one factor within each experimental condition. Thus, we averaged across these three items in the Socially Distant Altruism condition at the alternative potential recipient social distance levels of Countryperson (Cronbach’s ɑ= .94), Community Member

(Cronbach’s ɑ= .95), Friend (Cronbach’s ɑ= .98), and Family Member (Cronbach’s ɑ= .98) and in the Socially Close Altruism condition at the recipient social distance levels of Countryperson

(Cronbach’s ɑ= .84), Community Member (Cronbach’s ɑ= .86), Friend (Cronbach’s ɑ= .88), and

Family Member (Cronbach’s ɑ= .95).

IWAHs. The internal consistency of the IWAHs was sufficiently high in

Experiment 2 (Cronbach’s ɑ= .93). 23 BIASED BENEVOLENCE Moral Acceptability. A 2 (Decision: Socially Close vs. Socially Distant Altruism) × 5

(Social Distance: Chimp vs. Same Country vs. Same Town vs. Friend vs. Family; see

Supplemental Materials for results involving the “chimpanzee” condition) repeated measures

ANOVA was conducted using ratings of moral acceptability (collapsed across the two story types) as the dependent variable. Significant main effects were found for both Decision, F(1, 99)

2 2 = 6.78, p = .011, η p = .06, and for Social Distance, F(4, 96) = 12.10, p < .001, η p = .34, though these effects were qualified by a significant Decision ×Social Distance interaction, F(4, 96) =

2 29.37, p < .001, η p = .55. To decompose this interaction, we examined simple main effects of decision at each level of social distance. These tests revealed a crossover interaction in moral acceptability (see Figure 2; see Supplemental Materials for means and standard deviations).

Moral acceptability was higher in the Socially Distant Altruism condition when the entity not being helped was a countryperson, F(1, 99) = 10.44, p = .002, dz= .32, or a stranger from the same town, F(1, 99) = 8.55, p = .004, dz= .29. However, this pattern of judgments reversed at the level of friends, F(1, 99) = 10.24, p = .002, dz= .32, and family members, F(1, 99) = 35.66, p

< .001, dz= .60. 24 BIASED BENEVOLENCE Social Judgments. We conducted a 2 (Decision: Socially Close vs. Socially Distant

Altruism) × 4 (Social Distance: Same Country vs. Same Town vs. Friend vs. Family) repeated measures ANOVA using the composite Social Judgment measure (averaged across the two story types in the same manner as moral acceptability ratings) as the dependent variable (see Figure 3; see Supplemental Materials for means and standard deviations). Significant main effects were

2 found for both decision, F(1, 99) = 180.296, p < .001, η p = .65, and for social distance, F(3, 297)

2 = 21.3, p < .001, η p = .18, though these effects were qualified by a significant interaction, F(3,

2 297) = 49.5, p < .001, η p = .33. To decompose this interaction, we examined simple main effects of decision at each level of social distance. Social Judgments were more positive in the Socially

Close Altruism condition than in the Socially Distant Altruism condition at the levels of countryperson, F(1, 99) = 60.2, p < .001, dz= .78, stranger from the same town, F(1, 99) = 92.70, p < .001, dz= .96, friend, F(1, 99) = 183.00, p < .001, dz= 1.35, and family member, F(1, 99) =

187.00, p < .001, dz= 1.37. Thus, while socially close altruistic action always produced more positive social judgments of donors than socially distant altruistic action, the differing magnitude of this difference across levels of social distance appeared to drive the significant interaction effect.

Identification with all Humanity and Moral Acceptability. As hypothesized, a clear pattern emerged between judgments of moral acceptability and the extent to which participants identified with all humanity. Participants who scored higher on IWAHs judged socially distant altruistic action as more morally acceptable across all levels of social distance (see Table 3).

Experiment 3

In Experiment 2, we found that when social opportunity costs are made explicit, the perceived morality of socially close altruism systematically increases as the entity in need 25 BIASED BENEVOLENCE becomes socially closer to the donor. Replicating the findings from Experiment 1 and

Supplemental Experiment, we found that the perceived morality of socially distant altruism systematically decreases as the entity in need that does not receive aid becomes socially closer to the donor, and that moral judgments of socially distant altruism increase in tandem with participants’ identification with all of humanity. When the socially close entity in question is the donor’s friend or family member, socially distant altruism is seen as less morally acceptable than socially close altruism. We also found that socially distant altruism is accompanied by social costs, as socially distant altruists were subject to more negative social judgments evaluating their desirability as social partners than were socially close altruists across levels of potential recipient social distance in Experiment 2.

Experiment 3 addressed whether negative social judgments measured in Experiment 2 would translate into tangible, behavioral social consequences for socially distant altruists on a basis of their altruistic decisions by examining whether socially distant altruists (i.e., people who donate money to save the life of a distant stranger in another country) or socially close altruists

(i.e., people who spend their money on a dream vacation for their terminally ill child)3 are chosen more as partners in a social interaction (i.e., a round of an economic game). While the social judgment evaluating affiliation findings from Experiment 2 served as an initial first step, we chose to go a step farther in Experiment 3 by including a behavioral measure of cooperation to better investigate the possibility that altruists who help others on a basis of maximizing welfare without regard for social distance might be subject to impoverished social relationships in their personal lives.

33 These conditions were chosen for Experiment 3 to reflect an exemplary altruistic tradeoff discussed in the philosophical literature on effective altruism (e.g., Singer, 2015, 2016) between donating money to the Against Malaria Foundation, an effective charitable organization that can save the life of a distant stranger with every donation of a few thousand dollars and donating to Make-a-Wish America, an ineffective charitable organization that provides a terminally ill children with a positive experience (e.g., a vacation. a meet and greet with a celebrity) with every donation of a few thousand dollars. 26 BIASED BENEVOLENCE We hypothesized that a greater percentage of participants in Experiment 3 would select to play a round of an economic game with a socially close altruist as compared to a socially distant altruist and that participants would rate the altruistic behavior of the socially close altruist as more morally acceptable. As the measure consistently tracked with moral judgments across

Experiment 1, Supplemental Experiment and Experiment 2, the 9-item IWAHs (McFarland et al., 2012) was measured again in Experiment 3.

Method

Participants. Experiment 3 was run after our lab had adopted a policy of preregistering all experiments and was preregistered using Aspredicted (https://aspredicted.org/bm6xe.pdf). We conducted an a priori power analysis for the focal analyses in this study (logistic regression models predicting cooperation based on between-subjects condition), which indicated that a sample size of N = 336 would be needed to detect an odds ratio of 2.07 (equivalent to Cohen’s d

= 0.4) with .9 power given the following parameters: a two-tailed test, Pr(Y=1|X=1)H0 = 0.5, an alpha level = .05, R2 other X = 0, X distribution = binomial, X parm π= 0.5. Based on this, we made the conservative plan to collect data from N = 400 participants. We recruited N = 666 participants from MTurk in exchange for a small payment, 266 of whom were excluded for failing an attention check, leaving us with data from N = 400 participants (mean age = 37.19, SD

= 11.20, 39.8% female).

As we decided to collect more data than our power analysis indicated, we also conducted a sensitivity analysis which indicated that a sample of N = 400 would reliably detect an effect size of OR = 1.94 with 90% power given the same parameters specified above. We then conducted separate sensitivity analyses for the pairwise comparisons of moral acceptability across our different between-subjects conditions assuming a two-tailed test with an alpha of .05. 27 BIASED BENEVOLENCE With n = 153 participants in the Socially Distant Altruism condition and n = 145 participants in the Socially Close Altruism condition, we had .9 power to detect a mean difference of d = 0.38 between these conditions. With n = 102 in the No Altruism condition, we had .9 power to detect mean differences of d = 0.42 between either the Socially Distant or Socially Close Altruism conditions and the No Altruism condition.

Procedure. In a single-factor (Past Moral Decision of Potential Partner: Socially Close

Altruism, Socially Distant Altruism, No Altruism) between-subjects design, participants in

Experiment 3 were tasked with selecting a social partner to play with in an economic game.

Participants were instructed that they would be writing a brief essay response and then participating in several rounds of a game that would require them to distribute points between themselves and other players, with these points being converted to actual money at the end of the experiment (1 point = 1 cent). Participants were first asked to write about a time in their lives when they faced a difficult moral dilemma and what they ended up deciding to do in this situation. Participants were then provided with instructions for an economic game (a version of the game), responded to a question ensuring that they understood the mechanics of the game, and completed several practice trials.

Participants were then told that they would be offered a choice as to who they wanted as their social partner while playing this game. Participants were told the pool of potential partners for this game was composed of other participants in the same study who had also written about moral they had faced in their lives. Participants were told that they would have the chance to read other players’ responses to this question (i.e., the moral dilemma they had faced and what they ended up deciding to do) and then make a choice as to whether they wanted to cooperate in the economic game with this person or not. The moral dilemma described a 28 BIASED BENEVOLENCE situation in which the player’s child had become ill with a terminal medical condition. This player was tempted to take their child on their dream vacation, which would cost $5,000, though they were also aware of a charity that could use this same amount of money to save the life of a sick child in Africa. The player expressed uncertainty about what the morally correct decision was in this case.

The decision this hypothetical potential partner ended up making was manipulated in a between-subjects fashion, with three possible outcomes: in the Socially Close Altruism condition, the player decided to use the $5,000 to take their child on their dream vacation; in the

Socially Distant Altruism condition, the player decided to use the $5,000 to save the sick child in

Africa instead; in the No Altruism condition, the player decided to hold on to the $5,000 and use it for neither of these options. Participants then made a dichotomous decision as to whether they wanted this person as their partner in the economic game or not.

Following this, participants were asked about the moral acceptability of the choice made in the dilemma by the player they had just read about (from 1=completely unacceptable to

9=completely acceptable) and as an attention check, were asked what the final decision made by this other person was. Participants finally completed the 9-item Identification With All Humanity scale (McFarland et al., 2012) and provided basic demographic . As the participant was never actually given the opportunity to play the trust game with the partner they chose, we provided a cover story during the debriefing procedure informing each participant that they had participated in an abridged pilot version of a larger study we were planning to run.

Measures.

Cooperation Task. The economic game participants were told they would be playing was an adapted version of the trust game (Berg, Dickhaut, & McCabe, 1995). This economic game 29 BIASED BENEVOLENCE has been utilized in many studies as a measure of trust and cooperation within social interactions

(e.g., Burnham, McCabe, & Smith; Cesarini, Dawes, Fowler, Johannesson, Lichtensein, &

Wallace, 2008; Delgado, Frank, & Phelps, 2005), and, has been previously shown to sensitive to moral judgements of others (Everett, Pizzaro, Crockett, 2016). Specifically, Everett et al. (2016) found that people chose to cooperate with individual that made utilitarian judgments less compared with individuals that made deontological judgments in the trust game. Along with similar economic decision-making games, the trust game has been shown to predict real-world reciprocal and cooperative behaviors under certain conditions (e.g., Baran, Sapienza, & Zingales,

2009; Carpenter & Myers, 2010; Fehr & Leibbrandt, 2011). This game involves two players, both of whom begin the game with 50 points. The first player (“Person A”) makes a choice as to how many points of their 50 points they would like to send to a second player (“Person B”). This amount of points is then tripled and transferred to Person B. At this point, Person B can send back as many of these points to Person A as they would like while keeping the rest for themselves. Participants completed practice trials as Person B (the person receiving the tripled point amount and deciding how much to send back to Person A) but were told that for the actual trials of the game to be played with the partner they chose, they would be Person A (the player deciding how many points to initially send to Person B, i.e., how much “trust” they would place in this player). 30 BIASED BENEVOLENCE Results

Data Reduction and Reliability of Composite Measures.

IWAHs. Because we possessed a sample size large enough to do so, we first examined the factor structure of the IWAHs in Experiments 3 and 4. An EFA specifying the maximum likelihood extraction method using Oblimin rotation revealed a 1-factor structure for the IWAHs in both experiments (see supplemental materials). The internal consistency of the

IWAHs was sufficiently high in Experiment 3, (Chronbach’s ɑ= .91).

Moral Acceptability. We examined differences in ratings of the moral acceptability of the choice made by the potential partner across the three conditions. A one-way ANOVA yielded a significant difference in moral acceptability between the three conditions, F(2, 397) = 61.60, p

2 < .001, η p =.24. Pairwise comparisons were then conducted using a Bonferroni correction, showing that the moral acceptability of helping one’s own child was greater than that of helping a sick African child, t(296) = 7.37, p < .001, d = 0.86. The moral acceptability of helping one’s own child was also greater than that of keeping the money for oneself (M = 4.63, SD = 2.52), t(245) = -12.01, p < .001, d = 1.50, and the moral acceptability of helping a sick African child was also greater than that of keeping the money for oneself t(253) = -3.99, p < .001, d = 0.51 (see

Figure 4; see Supplemental Materials for means and standard deviations).

Cooperation. We next examined whether the proportion of participants deciding to cooperate in the economic game with the other participant whose moral dilemma they had read about differed by condition (i.e., what choice the person had made in this dilemma). To accomplish this, we tested two logistic regression models entering Condition (dummy-coded twice, first using the Control and then the Socially Close Altruist condition as a reference group allowing us to examine all pairwise comparisons) as an independent variable and the 31 BIASED BENEVOLENCE participant’s decision of whether or not to cooperate in the economic game with the person in question as a dependent variable.

Condition differences explained a significant amount of variability in cooperation decisions in these models, χ 2(2) = 55.86, p < .001, Nagelkerke R2 = .18. In the predicted direction, participants were slightly (though not significantly) more willing to cooperate with the other player in the Socially Close Altruism condition as compared to the Socially Distant

Altruism condition, b = 0.32, p = .187, OR = 1.38, 95% CI [0.86, 2.23]. Participants were more willing to cooperate in the Socially Close Altruism condition compared to the No Altruism condition, b = 1.97, p < .001, OR = 7.15, 95% CI [4.01, 12.74], and also more willing to cooperate in the Socially Distant Altruism condition as compared to the No Altruism condition, b = 1.64, p < .001, OR = 5.18, 95% CI [2.95, 9.08] (see Figure 5; see Supplemental Materials for the percentage of participants choosing to cooperate in each condition). Whereas we do not deem the percentage difference (7.4%) between the Socially Distant Altruism and Socially Close

Altruism conditions to be negligible, caution is warranted in interpreting this finding since we were not sufficiently powered to reliably detect an effect of this size (despite a fairly large sample size) and the confidence interval for the odds ratio overlaps 1.

Moderation by Moral Acceptability. We next tested our prediction that participants’ willingness to cooperate with the other player would be moderated by their judgment as to whether that player had behaved in a morally acceptable manner in the past (as revealed by the moral dilemma they had written about). To do so, we conducted logistic regression analyses mirroring those described above but including three additional predictors in each model to account for ratings of moral acceptability and their interactions with between-subjects condition.

Results from these analyses (provided in Table 4) revealed that, in general, those who rated the 32 BIASED BENEVOLENCE past behavior of the other player as more morally acceptable were also more likely to choose to cooperate with them.

However, significant interaction effects indicated that the relationship between perceived moral acceptability and cooperative behavior varied in strength by condition; the link between moral acceptability and cooperation was stronger in the Socially Distant Altruism as compared to the Socially Close Altruism condition and stronger in the No Altruism condition as compared to the Socially Close Altruism condition. The percentage of participants who cooperated with the other player as a function of condition and moral acceptability is displayed in Figure 6 (median splits were used to distinguish those who rated the actions of the other player as relatively high vs. low in moral acceptability for descriptive purposes only). As made clear by this figure, participants who cooperated versus did not cooperate with the other player could be clearly distinguished on the basis of how they viewed the morality of that other player’s actions in the

Socially Distant Altruism and No Altruism conditions, but not in the Socially Close Altruism condition (likely due to the higher and less variable ratings of moral acceptability observed in the

Socially Close Altruism condition as compared to the other two conditions, indicating that less disagreement exists about the actions of targets in the Socially Close Altruism condition). Thus, individual differences in the perceived morality of socially distant altruism predict differences in cooperative behaviors in a way that is untrue for socially close altruism, and it appears to be the subset of individuals that view socially distant altruism as less acceptable driving condition differences in both moral acceptability and cooperation.

Identification With All Humanity. Lastly, we explored whether people’s judgments of moral acceptability across the three conditions were associated with their IWAHs scores.

Replicating what was found in Experiment 1, Supplemental Experiment and Experiment 2, a 33 BIASED BENEVOLENCE significant positive relationship was found between IWAHs and moral acceptability in the

Socially Distant Altruism condition, b = 0.74, t(149) = 2.53, p = .012, sr = .20, whereas no such relationship was found in the Socially Close Altruism condition, b = -0.10, t(141) = -0.43, p

= .666, sr = -.04, nor in the No Altruism condition, b = 0.58, t(97) = 1.37, p = .175, sr = .14.

While our primary focus in the current research was on examining moral judgments of altruistic tradeoffs in social distance for gains in welfare, one exciting possibility for future research would be to try to enhance IWAH and related constructs (see Kahane et al., 2018) to see if it attenuates the effect of social distance on moral judgments of altruism.

Experiment 4

In Experiments 1-3, we found that third party moral judgments of socially distant altruism systematically become less positive as an alternative socially closer target who does not receive aid becomes progressively socially closer to the hypothetical donor. However, our manipulation of social distance in the previous experiments typically also involved differences in physical distance (e.g., helping a person in one’s town versus helping strangers in Africa). As prior work has shown that people tend to help less and assume their help will have less of an impact at greater physical distances (Touré-Tillery & Fishbach, 2017), we wanted to rule this out as an alternative explanation to determine whether it was in fact social distance that was driving the observed effects in Experiments 1-3.

If previous of an effect of social distance are purely accounted for by physical distance, then we would expect manipulating the social distance of people in need should not affect the moral acceptability of altruism when the physical distance of the targets is matched. Alternatively, if the previous observations of an effect of social distance are not purely accounted for by physical distance, then we could expect manipulating the social distance of 34 BIASED BENEVOLENCE people in need should still affect the moral acceptability of altruism even when targets are matched on physical distance.

By manipulating both of these variables in a 2 (Physical Distance, between-subjects) X 5

(Social Distance, within-subjects) mixed design, Experiment 4 allowed us to quantify effects of both physical and social distance, as well as their interaction, on judgments of helping behaviors.

This also allowed us to test the possibility of a more general role for psychological distance (as gauged by greater temporal, spatial, social, or hypothetical distance; Trope & Liberman, 2010) in determining the perceived morality of socially distant altruism.

Method

Participants. Experiment 4 was also run after our lab had adopted a policy of preregistering all experiments and was preregistered using Aspredicted

(https://aspredicted.org/p8u8m.pdf). An a priori power analysis determined we would need to collect data from a sample of N=328 in order to detect an effect size of d=0.4 (the standard effect size in the social psychological literature; Hobson et al., 2017) for any given two-group comparison with .95 power in Experiment 4. Taking a conservative approach, we determined before collecting data that we would collect usable data from N=400 participants (i.e., n=200 per each of the between-subjects conditions). We recruited N=474 participants from MTurk in exchange for a small payment, 74 of whom were excluded for failing an attention check. Thus, our final sample consisted of N=400 participants (mean age = 36 years, SD = 10.1, 40.3% female). Since we decided to collect more data than our power analysis indicated, we conducted a sensitivity analysis which revealed that a sample of N=400 participants would reliably be able to detect an effect size of d=.36 with 95% power for any between-subjects comparison assuming a two-tailed test and an alpha level of .05. 35 BIASED BENEVOLENCE Procedures. In a 2 (Physical Distance; between-subjects: near, far) X 5 (Social Distance; within-subjects: chimpanzee, countryperson, community member, friend, family member) X 2

(Story Type; within-subjects: story 1, story 2) mixed design, participants in Experiment 4 read a total of 10 vignettes describing a hypothetical moral dilemma in which an actor had to decide between donating money to a socially distant cause involving a greater gain in welfare (a cause that would save multiple or many lives of strangers overseas) or a socially closer cause involving a lesser gain in welfare (a cause that would save one or few lives of socially closer entities). The actors’ decisions were held constant, such that the actor donated money to the more socially distant cause in all 10 of the vignettes and denied money to the socially close cause. In the same way as Experiment 1, the social closeness to the actor of the potential recipient who was denied money was manipulated within-subjects. In addition to social distance, we also manipulated the physical distance between the donor in the vignette and the socially closer entity who was denied money between-subjects with the following levels: the (socially close entity who is denied money) is currently nearby to the donor (i.e., the physically close condition), and the (socially close entity who is denied money) is currently in a distant country (i.e., the physically distant condition). Finally, in the same manner as Experiment 2, two story types were used as blueprints to compose the vignettes in Experiment 4 in order to increase the generalizability of our results.

We determined that moral acceptability ratings and social judgments were strongly correlated and not significantly different between the two story types (see Supplemental Materials), thus we collapsed these two dependent variables across story types for our primary and secondary analyses. Participants within each level of the physical distance independent variable were presented with 10 trials in randomized order: two trials per each of the five levels of the social distance independent variable. 36 BIASED BENEVOLENCE Measures. After reading each vignette, participants reported the moral acceptability of the decision made by the actor in the vignette on the same scale used in Experiments 1-3. The same perceived affiliation, donor character judgment, and desired affiliation measures used in

Experiment 2 were also measured after each vignette in Experiment 4. Finally, the IWAHs

(McFarland et al., 2012) and manipulation checks of physical and social distance were measured toward the end of the experiment. To examine the efficacy of our social distance manipulation, participants were asked to rank the order in which they personally found the five social distance targets to be socially distant from them on a 1-5 ordinal scale (1 = “the socially closest target” - 5

= “the most socially distant target”). To examine the efficacy of our physical distance manipulation, participants were asked to rank the order in which they personally found the two physical distance anchors used in Experiment 4 (i.e., someone in another country, someone who is nearby) to be physically distant from them on a two point scale (1 = “the physically closest entity” – 2 = “the most physically distant entity”).

Results

Data Reduction and Reliability of Composite Measures.

Social Judgments. An EFA with Oblimin rotation (see supplemental materials) revealed that perceived affiliation, character judgment, and desire to affiliate items loaded onto one factor at each level of the social distance independent variable. Thus, we averaged across these three items in the condition in which the entity not receiving help was a Countryperson

(Chronbach’s ɑ= .94), a Community Member (Chronbach’s ɑ= .94), a Friend (Chronbach’s

ɑ= .97), and a Family Member (Chronbach’s ɑ= .96).

IWAHs. The internal consistency of the IWAHs was sufficiently high in

Experiment 4, Cronbach’s ɑ= .92. 37 BIASED BENEVOLENCE Manipulation Checks. A one-way, repeated-measures ANOVA revealed a main effect of target social distance on the self-reported perceived social distance of the targets, F(4,2680) =

2 810, p < .001, η p = .67. Bonferroni-corrected post-hoc tests were conducted comparing the perceived social distance ratings across the five targets, revealing that participants generally perceived the intended degree of social distance for each of the five targets (See Supplemental

Materials for statistics regarding the manipulation checks). As we intended, all of the participants included in the analyses perceived the nearby entity to be physically closest and the entity in another country to be most physically distant.

Moral Acceptability. A 2 × 5 mixed ANOVA on ratings of moral acceptability revealed

2 a main effect of social distance, F(4, 1580) = 160.62, p < .001, η p = .29, as well as a much

2 weaker main effect of physical distance, F(1, 395) = 5.76, p = .017, η p = .01. The social distance

2 ×physical distance interaction was nonsignificant, F(4, 1580) = 1.67, p = .155, η p = .00 (see

Figure 7a). The main effect of physical distance was such that helping a socially distant stranger was more morally acceptable when the alternative socially closer entity was physically distant

(M = 7.50, SD = 1.56) rather than physically close (M = 7.13, SD = 1.57). To decompose the main effect of social distance, Bonferroni-corrected post-hoc tests were conducted comparing moral acceptability ratings across levels of social distance when collapsing across levels of physical distance. In line with the interpretation that social distance affects moral acceptability even when physical distance is matched, these analyses revealed a downward trend in moral acceptability as the person not receiving help became socially closer to the donor, with each level of increasing social closeness being judged as significantly less acceptable than the last excluding the difference between countrypeople and community members (see Figure 7b; see

Supplemental Materials for descriptive and inferential statistics). 38 BIASED BENEVOLENCE Social Judgments.

A 2 × 5 mixed ANOVA on the composite social judgment measure revealed a significant

2 main effect of social distance, F(3, 1182) = 187.27, p < .001, η p = .32, with nonsignificant

2 effects for both physical distance, F(1, 394) = 3.05, p = .082, η p = .01, and the social distance ×

2 physical distance interaction, F(3, 1182) = 0.35, p = .790, η p = .00. Whereas participants reported similar levels of perceived donor-recipient affiliation, character judgments and desire to affiliate with the donor at both levels of physical distance (Close: M = 4.44, SD = 1.38; Distant:

M = 4.68, SD = 1.38), as entities not receiving help became socially closer, participants reported less-positive social judgments of the donor. Bonferroni-corrected post-hoc tests (see Figure 8; see Supplemental Materials for descriptive and inferential statistics) revealed that, while affiliation ratings in the Countryperson and Community Member conditions did not significantly differ, ratings in both of these conditions were significantly higher than those in the Friend and

Family Member conditions, and ratings in the Friend condition were significantly higher than those in the Family Member condition.

Identification With All Humanity. Finally, we explored whether ratings of moral acceptability within each social distance condition (collapsing across levels of physical distance) differed on the basis of participants’ IWAHs scores. As in prior studies, we first controlled for participants’ identification with their country and community by entering these as predictors in the first step of a multiple regression model, then entered their identification with humanity scores at a second step. IWAH was a significant positive predictor of moral acceptability ratings in the Countryperson condition, b = 0.08, t(396) = 6.83, p < .001, ∆R2 = .11, the Community

Member condition, b = 0.07, t(396) = 5.48, p < .001, ∆R2 = .07, the Friend condition, b = 0.12, 39 BIASED BENEVOLENCE t(396) = 6.40, p < .001, ∆R2 = .09, and the Family Member condition, b = 0.14, t(396) = 7.13, p

< .001, ∆R2 = .11.

General Discussion

When judging the morality of altruistic tradeoffs in social distance for gains in welfare advocated by the philosophy and social movement of effective altruism, we find that the perceived morality of altruism is graded by social distance. People consistently view socially distant altruism as less morally acceptable as the person not receiving help becomes socially closer to the agent helping. This suggests that whereas altruism is generally evaluated as morally praiseworthy, the moral calculus of altruism flexibly shifts according to the social distance between the person offering aid and the people in need. Such findings highlight the empirical value and theoretical importance of investigating moral judgments situated in real-world social contexts. 40 BIASED BENEVOLENCE While recent work on perceptions of impartial helping behaviors has found conflicting results on whether people judge the actions of those who favored welfare-maximizing causes instead of close relationships as less morally acceptable (Hughes, 2017; Everett et al., 2018;

McManus et al., 2020), our findings are consistent with those of Hughes (2017) and McManus et al. (2020). Moral judgments of helping are indeed sensitive to the closeness of the relationship between donors and recipients of help; whereas helping a socially closer person from one’s country or town instead of a distant stranger in greater need is seen as the less morally acceptable option, helping a close friend or family member instead of that same stranger is seen as more morally acceptable. Further, these effects carry into judgments about how good of a relationship partner a helper is (e.g., how good of a friend or family member they are), their willingness to cooperate with helpers in an economic trust game, and do not rely on another factor known to influence the assumed impact of one’s helping: physical distance (Touré-Tillery & Fishbach,

2017). 41 BIASED BENEVOLENCE Whereas we did not probe the mechanism by which social distance exerts its effects on moral judgments, prior work suggests a number of factors either encompassed by or overlapping with social distance that might help account for these effects. For example, socially closer others are more likely to be genetically related, reciprocate help in the future, and be seen as ingroup members - all factors known to make helping more likely due to the adaptive value of these forms of helping (Hamilton, 1963; Greene, 2014; Trivers, 1971). Socially closer individuals also tend to elicit greater levels of empathy (Cikara et al., 2014), perceived obligation (Hughes, 2017;

McManus et al., 2020), and loyalty (Graham et al., 2013), and are likely to be seen as more similar to oneself (Liviatan et al., 2008). Third-party moral judgments of socially close versus distant altruism may result from a combination of such factors working in tandem, although further research would be needed to parse which of these factors matters most and the extent to which first-person social preferences map onto third-party moral judgments. 42 BIASED BENEVOLENCE We acknowledge that our scenarios varied not only in social distance but in other ways as well, such as the extent of need experienced by a potential recipient of help or the amount of good a donation could potentially do. However, this difference in need was intentional as the aim of the present studies was to explicitly investigate the types of real-world helping behaviors advocated for by effective altruism, and these factors do in fact vary with social distance in realistic settings (GiveWell, 2019; Singer, 2016). What’s more, given that increasing social distance decreases moral acceptability even in cases where the need of socially distant others is severely higher than the need of socially close others (e.g., when a donor chooses to save the life of one socially close other for $300 instead of choosing to save the lives of three people in Africa for $300 in Experiment 1) underscores just how central social distance is to moral judgments of altruism. Another possibility that remains to be explored is whether explicit knowledge of helper’s for acting in the way that they do would make a difference for moral judgments of those actions; for example, it is possible that the gap in moral judgments between socially distant and socially close altruism would narrow if participants were told that socially distant helpers sought specifically to maximize the welfare of their helping decisions.

More broadly, the current research dovetails with recent work on the morality of harm in virtuous suggesting that, while people generally view harming others as immoral, people believe that committing violence can be the morally right thing to depending on the social context (e.g., the use of force to defend one’s family; Fiske & Rai, 2015; Rai et al., 2017).

Viewing socially motivated judgments of altruism (biased benevolence) through the same lens as virtuous violence may be a productive avenue for research to further explore. 43 BIASED BENEVOLENCE These results point to a key social-cognitive roadblock in realizing the goals of effective altruism, but critically this depends on if people explicitly consider social opportunity costs inherent to effective altruism (i.e., Pilot Study vs. Experiments 1-4). Ironically, effective altruists’ arguments for valuing everyone’s life and welfare equally when making donation decisions may focus attention on the social opportunity costs inherent in such decisions, serving to decrease rather than increase the perceived moral acceptability of helping others that need it the most. Relatedly, these findings also shed new light on related views of charitable giving known as distorted altruism, which suggests that failures to maximize welfare in donation decisions occur when people lack objective information about welfare gains that would enable them to directly contrast the welfare gains across different charities (Berman et al., 2018; Small,

2010). Our results, therefore, further temper views of correcting distorted altruism in philanthropy through explicit knowledge of welfare gains and point to a central role of social distance in shaping these decisions. 44 BIASED BENEVOLENCE In sum, the current findings shed new light on how people perceive the morality of altruism with pragmatic considerations and implications for promoting socially distant altruism.

One of the central aims guiding psychology has been to identify causes of social bias and then figure out how to reduce or eliminate social bias in altruistic and moral responses (Dovidio et al.,

1997; Greene, 2014; Hein et al., 2010; Levine et al., 2005), applying these findings to promote real-world helping directed at distant and dissimilar others (Clore, & Jeffery, 1972; Condon et al., 2013; Gentile et al., 2009; Jazaieri et al., 2014; Johnson & Goldstein, 2003; Shipley, 2008).

While reducing social biases in altruism is clearly an important and valuable goal, our current findings suggest that attempts to decrease social biases in altruism often advanced in psychology, philosophy, and philanthropy may have unintended consequences on moral judgments, ultimately diminishing social evaluations and constraining cooperative behavior. 45 BIASED BENEVOLENCE References

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Experiment 1

Figure 1. Mean moral acceptability for socially distant altruistic actions committed in lieu of helping fellow countrypeople, community members, friends, and family members in

Experiment 1 (for results including the “chimpanzee” condition, see Supplemental Materials).

Error bars represent ± 1 SEM. Scale ranges from 1 “completely unacceptable” to 9 “completely acceptable”. The leftmost end of each significance bracket falls above the reference group for the relevant comparison and each series of asterisks indicates a statistically significant mean difference between the reference group and the comparison group directly below. 57 BIASED BENEVOLENCE Table 1. Correlation coefficients between the five moral foundations included on the

Moral Foundations Questionnaire and moral judgments of socially distant altruism that comes at the opportunity cost of not being able to help one or few countrypeople, community members, friends, and family members.

(r) Country Person Community Friend Family Member

Member Care .121 .082 -.009 -.073 (ɑ= .72)

Fairness .137 .105 .046 -.030 (ɑ= .58)

Loyalty -.192 -.253** -.345** -.224* (ɑ= .44)

Authority -.193 -.198 -.323** -.185 (ɑ= .81)

Purity -.119 -.105 -.171 .021 (ɑ= .88) * p < .05 **p < .01 ***p < .001 58 BIASED BENEVOLENCE Table 2. Partial correlations between identification with all of humanity (IWAHs) scores and ratings of moral acceptability for socially distant altruistic actions benefiting strangers overseas taken in lieu of helping one or few of the below entities (from Experiment 1). IWAHs community and country subscale scores were entered as controls.

(r) Country Person Community Friend Family Member Member

IWAHs (ɑ= .86) .231* .176 .232* .307**

* p < .05 **p < .01 ***p < .001 59 BIASED BENEVOLENCE Experiment 2

Figure 2. Mean moral acceptability for socially distant and socially close altruistic actions committed in lieu of the alternative type of altruistic action at varying degrees of socially close recipient social distance (Experiment 2). Scale ranges from 1 “completely unacceptable” to

9 “completely acceptable”. See Supplemental Materials for results including the “chimpanzee” condition. The leftmost end of each significance bracket falls above the reference group for the relevant comparison and each series of asterisks indicates a statistically significant mean difference between the reference group and the comparison group directly below. 60 BIASED BENEVOLENCE

Figure 3. Mean composite social judgment of donors by condition in Experiment 2. Error bars represent ± 1 SEM. Scale ranges from 1 “strongly disagree” to 7 “strongly agree” and higher scores represent more-positive social judgments. The leftmost end of each significance bracket falls above the reference group for the relevant comparison and each series of asterisks indicates a statistically significant mean difference between the reference group and the comparison group directly below. 61 BIASED BENEVOLENCE Table 3. Partial correlations between identification with all of humanity (IWAHs) scores

and ratings of moral acceptability for socially distant and socially close altruistic actions in

Experiment 2. IWAHs community and country subscale scores were entered as controls.

(r) Countryperson Community Friend Family Member Member IWAH Socially . (ɑ= .93) Distant .416*** 361*** .388* .359*** Altruism

Socially Close -.070 -.105 -.173 -.121 Altruism

* p < .05 **p < .01 ***p < .001 62 BIASED BENEVOLENCE Experiment 3

Figure 4. Moral acceptability ratings of other participants’ decisions to make socially distant altruistic, socially close altruistic, or non-altruistic donations in Experiment 3. Error bars represent ± 1 SEM. Scale ranges from 1 “completely unacceptable” to 9 “completely acceptable”. The leftmost end of each significance bracket falls above the reference group for the relevant comparison and each series of asterisks indicates a statistically significant mean difference between the reference group and the comparison group directly below. 63 BIASED BENEVOLENCE

Figure 5. Percentage of participants choosing to cooperate or not cooperate in an economic game with another participant who had indicated in their moral dilemma that they had made a socially distant altruistic, socially close altruistic, or non-altruistic donation decision in the past in Experiment 3. The leftmost end of each significance bracket falls above the reference group for the relevant comparison and each series of asterisks indicates a statistically significant difference in the percentage of participants choosing to cooperate between the reference group and the comparison group directly below. 64 BIASED BENEVOLENCE Table 4. Results (including regression coefficients, p values, odds ratios, and their 95% confidence intervals) from logistic regression models predicting cooperation in the trust game from dummy-coded condition (SD: Socially Distant Altruism, SC: Socially Close Altruism, NA:

No Altruism), mean-centered moral acceptability (accept), and their interaction in Experiment 3.

Model Predictor b p OR 95% CI

1 SC vs. NA 1.06 .004 2.89 [1.42, 5.91]

SD vs. NA 1.56 < .001 4.77 [2.34, 9.72]

accept 0.66 < .001 1.93 [1.45, 2.57]

SC vs. NA × accept -0.40 .025 0.67 [0.47, 0.95]

SD vs. NA × accept -0.03 .874 0.97 [0.69, 1.38]

2 NA vs. SC -1.06 .004 0.35 [0.17, 0.71]

SD vs. SC 0.50 .126 1.65 [0.87, 3.12]

accept 0.26 .012 1.29 [1.06, 1.58]

NA vs. SC × accept 0.40 .025 1.49 [1.05, 2.12]

SD vs. SC × accept 0.37 .009 1.45 [1.10, 1.92] 65 BIASED BENEVOLENCE

Figure 6. Percentage of participants who chose to cooperate with the other player broken down by condition and ratings of the moral acceptability of that other player’s actions (based on median split) in Experiment 3. 66 BIASED BENEVOLENCE

Experiment 4

Figure 7a. Mean moral acceptability of socially distant altruistic actions across social and physical distance in Experiment 4. Error bars represent ± 1 SEM. Scale ranges from 1

“completely unacceptable” to 9 “completely acceptable”. 67 BIASED BENEVOLENCE

Figure 7b. Mean moral acceptability of socially distant altruistic actions across social distance (collapsed across physical distance) in Experiment 4. Error bars represent ± 1 SEM.

Scale ranges from 1 “completely unacceptable” to 9 “completely acceptable”. The leftmost end of each significance bracket falls above the reference group for the relevant comparison and each series of asterisks indicates a statistically significant mean difference between the reference group and the comparison group directly below. 68 BIASED BENEVOLENCE

Figure 8. Mean composite social judgment of donors at each level of social distance

(collapsed across physical distance) in Experiment 4. Error bars represent ± 1 SEM. Scale ranges from 1 “strongly disagree” to 7 “strongly agree” and higher scores represent more-positive social judgments. The leftmost end of each significance bracket falls above the reference group for the relevant comparison and each series of asterisks indicates a statistically significant mean difference between the reference group and the comparison group directly below.