Seminar The Shape of Moral Satisfaction

Abstract

People differ in how their prosocial behavior evolves over repeated decisions: some remain consistently prosocial, while others reduce their prosociality after an initial good deed. We argue that these patterns are driven by the curvature of moral satisfaction, the hedonic utility from acting in line with one’s personal norms. The central question is whether individuals experience increasing or decreasing marginal  moral satisfaction from good deeds, and how much this curvature varies across people. In our model, increasing marginal moral satisfaction generates moral consistency, whereas diminishing marginal moral satisfaction generates moral licensing.  We study this mechanism in an online two-stage experiment that holds material incentives constant while varying moral framing. Combining behavioral choices with  linguistic measures of moral engagement allows us to recover substantial heterogeneity in the shape of moral satisfaction. We find that participants with higher  moral engagement exhibit diminishing marginal moral satisfaction, while less engaged participants display increasing marginal moral satisfaction. Finally, we find  that moral satisfaction extends across domains: moral actions in different contexts appear to serve as substitutable sources of hedonic utility, helping explain when good deeds crowd in versus crowd out future prosocial behavior.