Economic inequality and relative deprivation influence prosocial decisions towards moral and immoral causes

Abstract

Economic inequality influences the decisions made by people including prosocial decisions. People make prosocial choices to support organizations that might be moral or immoral in nature. Prosocial choices create moral conflict pitting material values against moral values. Prosociality towards moral cause involves moral gain at material cost. Contrastingly, prosociality towards immoral cause involves material gain at moral cost. How are such choices affected by economic inequality and feelings of relative deprivation? Under high and low economic inequality, we had three experimentally induced relative deprivation groups; best-off, middle, and worst-off. We found that high economic inequality led to more prosocial decisions towards immoral causes in order to gain monetary benefit. Additionally, the worst-off group gave more to immoral causes as compared to best-off group. However, it was the middle group that donated most to immoral cause for material benefit. This was not the case for moral cause. Our study presents important findings for understanding the charitable activities of not just rich and poor, but also middle-income groups under high economic inequality. Our findings suggest that deprived individuals ameliorate their status quo through immoral choices but also show generosity at personal cost in order to help others. This suggests that prosocial behavior is more complex and contextually dependent than earlier understood.