Inquiry Three: Research Blog 6

“Doing Good or Doing Well? Image Motivation and Monetary Incentives in Behaving Prosocially”

Dan Ariely, Anat Bracha and Stephan Meier

The American Economic Review , Vol. 99, No. 1 (Mar., 2009), pp. 544-555

This article examines the reasons what influences people to donate to charity. I really like this article because it directly relates to my topic, and provides evidence, experiments, and opinions that I can add throughout my paper to support other evidence I found in previous research. The article experiments with the idea that people want to portray themselves in the best light possible, or prosocially, as the author names it. The author sets of experiments surrounding three different factors: intrinsic, extrinsic, and image motivation. Intrinsic motivation is “the value of giving per se, represented by private preferences others’ well-being, such as pure altruism or other forms of prosocial preferences. Extrinsic motivation is “any material reward or benefit associated with giving, such as thank-you gestures and tax breaks.” Image motivation “refers to an individual’s tendency to be motivated partly by others’ perceptions. Image motivation therefore captures the rule of opinion in utility, i.e., the desire to be liked and respected by others and by one’s self.” I feel like I can incorporate the experiment the author did to prove these motivations, as well as the motivations themselves, to explain why people donate to charity.