Jerry Richardson, M.A. '23, a doctoral candidate in psychology, was dashing into a grocery store on his way to a dinner party when a man outside the store asked him for some food. Richardson obliged, and gave him $7 of groceries. The recipient was so grateful, and Richardson felt so good about his gift, he thought he'd tell his dinner partners about the experience.
But an icky feeling soon took over. Richardson decided not to tell his friends. And then he refrained from posting about his good deed on social media.
The experience prompted Richardson and his colleagues to investigate how people perceive the emotional cost of reporting one's own good deeds - and how they think others will feel if they do too.
Richardson is the lead author of the paper, "The Do-gooder Dilemma," published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology's November issue. His co-authors are Paul Bloom of the University of Toronto; and Shaun Nichols, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Philosophy, and David Pizarro, professor of psychology, both in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Across five studies, the researchers demonstrated that people believe that they would feel worse telling others about their good deeds, such as giving to those in need, than if they kept the news to themselves, or told others about their personal achievements, like getting a job promotion.
"It was a bit of a surprise, to know that people actually are pretty intuitive about themselves - that they think they will feel bad afterward," Pizarro said.
In the studies, the researchers asked several hundred people to recall a good deed and a personal achievement they'd performed in the past, and how happy, proud, ashamed and embarrassed they feel about both of those acts.
Then the study participants were asked to imagine how they'd feel if they told a friend about these acts, and how they'd feel if they posted about them on social media.
The participants said they'd feel more ashamed and embarrassed telling friends about their good deed and posting about it on social media. But they'd feel more proud and happy about sharing a personal achievement.
"Our suspicion is that people are just aware of the fact that, if they talk about these good deeds that they've committed, people might think that they were motivated by the social credit, the reputational boost, that they would get," Richardson said.
This explanation is consistent with the more extreme emotional penalty predicted when posting a good deed on social media compared to telling a friend, the team wrote in the paper. "This could result in a dose of embarrassment and/or shame that washes away the warm glow of the altruistic act because actors are aware of the reputational cost that may ensue," they wrote.
The researchers also found a surprising outcome: The study participants believed that while they would feel bad when sharing their good deeds, others would feel a lot better than the study participants would.
That could be because it's hard to really imagine other people's experiences, Richardson said.
"We think that's because we just don't have access to the inner states of others in that way," he said. "Our simulations of their minds tend to be a bit shallower than our own."
An additional takeaway from the work is that sharing stories of one's own good deeds may be an unwise way to show others our moral character, Richardson said, and telling everyone about our good deeds might make us feel worse.
"Oscar Wilde might be right. He said the nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously - and have somebody find out."
