Open AccessThe tainted altruism effect: a successful pre-registered replication
Author(s) -
Valerie Alcala,
Kendra Johnson,
Caroline Steele,
Juanshu Wu,
Donglai Zhang,
Harold Pashler
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
royal society open science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.84
H-Index - 51
ISSN - 2054-5703
DOI - 10.1098/rsos.211152
Subject(s) - replication (statistics) , altruism (biology) , biology , computer science , psychology , evolutionary biology , virology
Newman and Cain (Newman, Cain 2014Psychol. Sci. 25 , 648–655 (doi:10.1177/0956797613504785 )) reported that observers view a person's choices as less ethical when that person has acted in response to both altruistic and selfish (commercial) motivations, as compared with purely selfish interests. The altruistic component reduces the observers' approval rather than raising it. This puzzling phenomenon termed the ‘tainted altruism’ effect, has attracted considerable interest but no direct replications in prior research. We report direct replications of Newman and Cain's Experiments 2 and 3, using a larger sample (n = 501) intended to be fairly representative of the US population. The results confirm the original findings in considerable detail.