Differential virtue discounting: Public generosity is seen as more selfish than public impartiality Gordon T. Kraft-Todd*a, Max Kleiman-Weinerb, Liane Younga aDepartment of Psychology, McGuinn 300, 140 Commonwealth Ave, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 ; bDepartment of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138 *Corresponding author: [email protected] Abstract There is a paradox in our desire to be seen as virtuous. If we do not overtly display our virtues, others will not be able to see them; yet, if we do overtly display our virtues, others may think that we do so only for social credit. Here, we investigate how virtue signaling works across two distinct virtues—generosity and impartiality—in eleven online experiments (total N=4,586). We demonstrate the novel phenomenon of differential virtue discounting, revealing that participants perceive actors who demonstrate virtue in public to be less virtuous than actors who demonstrate virtue in private, and, critically, that this effect is greater for generosity than impartiality. Further, we provide evidence for the mechanism underlying these judgments, showing that they are mediated by perceived selfish motivations. We discuss how these findings and our novel terminology can shed light on open questions in the social perception of reputation and motivation. Keywords: virtue signaling, virtue discounting, reputation, generosity, impartiality, virtue Introduction Virtue signaling—i.e. conspicuous, public displays of admirable moral behavior—has only recently entered the cultural lexicon (Bartholomew, 2015). The term was coined—and is often used—to pejoratively describe a class of behaviors (e.g. "outrage": Crockett, 2017; Spring, Cameron, & Cikara, 2018) enabled by social media where actors invest minimal effort to widely broadcast their support for a cause. Though some defend such behavior by claiming that it can raise awareness of a cause, many remain skeptical because it enables actors to reap reputational rewards without meaningfully contributing to change. Such skeptics engage in what we call virtue discounting, i.e. the devaluing of virtuous behavior to the extent that ulterior, selfish (e.g. reputational) motivations can be inferred for actors’ behavior. The phenomena of virtue signaling and virtue discounting predate social media. Various spiritual and philosophical traditions have debated the merits of public displays of virtue (as discussed in De Freitas, DeScioli, Thomas, & Pinker, 2019). Previous research demonstrating these phenomena generally treat virtue as a single dimension: generosity (e.g. Barclay & Willer, 2007). Yet, in treatments of virtue both ancient (e.g. Aristotle’s virtue ethics) and modern (Graham et al., 2011), virtue is not considered a unitary construct, but a collection of conceptually distinct morally admirable traits. We depart from previous work by asking: are some virtues more subject to skepticism than others? Here, we present the first evidence of differential virtue discounting: different virtues are discounted to a different degree. Specifically, we show that participants engage in greater discounting of generosity than of impartiality. Why do people virtue signal? Individuals demonstrate concern for their reputations, i.e. how they are perceived by others (Emler, 1990). A virtuous reputation, specifically, can grant individuals higher social status (Bai, 2017), which can in turn lead to greater wealth and well- being (Henrich & Gil-White, 2001). We define virtue as a stable trait demonstrating other- regarding preferences through prosocial (i.e. other-benefiting) behavior. There is ample evidence that when individuals’ behavior is observable to others, e.g. done in public, individuals are more likely to behave prosocially (in the lab, e.g. Milinski, Semmann, & Krambeck, 2002; and in the field, e.g. Yoeli, Hoffman, Rand, & Nowak, 2013). People do not merely react to being observed, but also actively engage in managing others’ impressions of them (Jones & Pittman, 1982). It is therefore unsurprising that people attempt to signal their virtue (e.g. Barclay & Willer, 2007; Jordan, Hoffman, Bloom, & Rand, 2016). It is worth noting, however, that most previous demonstrations of virtue signaling have focused on a single virtue—e.g. generosity (Barclay & Willer, 2007), trustworthiness (Jordan et al., 2016), or impartiality (Kleiman-Weiner, Shaw, & Tenenbaum, 2017)—while little research exists comparing virtue signaling across virtues. Why (and how) do observers sometimes discount actors’ virtuous behavior? Given the benefits of a virtuous reputation, people may be motivated to exaggerate or falsely signal their virtue. Our distaste for such behavior may explain our condemnation of moral hypocrites, who espouse moral virtues in public but fail to act on them in private (Jordan, Sommers, Bloom, & Rand, 2017). Virtue discounting relies on the human capacity for theory of mind, i.e. the ability to reason about others’ mental states (Saxe, Carey, & Kanwisher, 2004). Of particular relevance here, this enables us to consider actors’ motivations, which in turn affects our moral judgments (Young, Cushman, Hauser, & Saxe, 2007). When observers infer selfish ulterior motives for prosocial behavior, they perceive actors less favorably (e.g. Newman & Cain, 2014). One cue to such inference is when observers know that actors know that they are being observed: observers can then infer that actors are motivated by the selfish desire to achieve a good reputation, rather than by their virtue (Barclay & Willer, 2007). Here, we propose to replicate these findings, showing that observers will discount public displays of virtue (H1, see Methods). Expanding on this prior work, we explore perceptions of selfish motivations by decomposing the concept into “negative” self-oriented motivations (e.g. for reputational benefit) and “positive” moral motives (e.g. to signal a desired social norm). We expect these to be negatively correlated (see Methods and Table 3). We further expand on previous research by exploring virtue signaling and virtue discounting across two virtues that have been conceptually distinguished (Shaw, 2013): generosity, which we define as trait willingness to confer benefits to others at cost to oneself; and impartiality which we define as trait desire to treat others equally and without bias. These virtues have also been empirically distinguished (e.g. Shaw, Choshen-Hillel, & Caruso, 2018). As discussed above, there is ample evidence that people signal generosity (Barclay & Willer, 2007), but there is also emerging evidence that people signal impartiality (Kleiman-Weiner et al., 2017), and that this emerges early in development (Shaw & Olson, 2012). We believe that generosity and impartiality might be further distinguished by the extent to which they are discounted. Our tentative directional hypothesis is motivated by the intuition that there might be greater selfish motivations for being perceived as generous compared to impartial. Despite the growing body of work demonstrating the reputational benefits for being seen as impartial (for a review, see Shaw, 2016), there is a large literature demonstrating the reputational benefits for being seen as generous (for a review, see Barclay, 2013). It could be the case that the latter outweigh the former: consider, for example, an observer’s desire to interact with an actor who is seen as an exemplar of each virtue: while the observer could at most expect fair treatment from an extremely impartial actor, they might expect special treatment from an extremely generous actor. Thus, if an actor is perceived as generous (even if they are not), this might make them more attractive than if they are perceived as impartial. In sum: people stand to benefit from having virtuous reputations, and are therefore motivated to signal (and perhaps exaggerate) their virtue. Because virtue is not monolithic, but is comprised of conceptually distinct virtues, there may be heterogeneity in the benefit of having a reputation for different virtues. Due to the potential for false signaling, observers are likely to be skeptical of virtue signals to the extent that they infer ulterior selfish motivations for actors’ behavior. Finally, the extent that observers discount different virtues may depend on how selfish they think actors’ motivations are for publicly signaling these virtues. General Methods All online experiments were conducted using Qualtrics survey software, a convenience sample of participants were recruited using the crowdsourcing tool Amazon Mechanical Turk (Arechar, Kraft-Todd, & Rand, 2017). Data analysis for all studies was completed using STATA 13, and informed consent was obtained from all participants. We excluded duplicate Amazon worker IDs and IP addresses to prevent analyzing multiple observations per participant. The pre- study procedure was to ask participants to provide their mTurk IDs and transcribe a sentence of difficult-to-read handwritten text (the latter to prevent bot participation and discourage low-effort workers, a commonly used method on this platform; e.g. Kraft-Todd & Rand, 2019). In total, we requested N=4,000 participants (N=100/condition), but because some participants may have completed the survey but failed to enter their completion code to mTurk (thus allowing others to complete the survey), the final sample was N=4,012 participants (47.0% female, average age=35.8 years) across all nine experiments presented in the primary analyses. Participants completed the study