Abstract construals make the emotional rewards of prosocial behavior more salient

Abstract

Although previous research has shown that helping others leads to higher happiness than helping oneself, people frequently predict that self-serving behavior will make them happier than prosocial behavior. Here, we explore whether abstract construal—thinking about an event from a higher level, distanced perspective—influences predictions about how rewarding prosocial actions will be for people’s own well-being. In Experiment 1, Hurricane Katrina volunteers who adopted an abstract construal predicted that their efforts would be more rewarding than did volunteers who adopted a concrete construal. Experiment 2 provided a conceptual replication with a hypothetical donation scenario; people who adopted an abstract rather than concrete construal predicted that giving more money would be more rewarding than giving less. These findings suggest that people are more likely to appreciate the emotional benefits of prosocial actions when they adopt high-level construals than when they adopt low-level construals.

Full text

Abstract Construal Makes the Emotional Rewards of Prosocial Behavior More Salient
Lara B. Aknin
Simon Fraser University
Leaf Van Boven
University of Colorado Boulder
Laura Johnson-Graham
University of Colorado Boulder
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Abstract
Although previous research has shown that helping others leads to higher happiness than helping
oneself, people frequently predict that self-serving behavior will make them happier than
prosocial behavior. Here, we explore whether abstract construal—thinking about an event from
a higher level, distanced perspective—influences predictions about how rewarding prosocial
actions will be for people’s own well-being. In Experiment 1, Hurricane Katrina volunteers who
adopted an abstract construal predicted that their efforts would be more rewarding than did
volunteers who adopted a concrete construal. Experiment 2 provided a conceptual replication
with a hypothetical donation scenario; people who adopted an abstract rather than concrete
construal predicted that giving more money would be more rewarding than giving less. These
findings suggest that people are more likely to appreciate the emotional benefits of prosocial
actions when they adopt high-level construals than when they adopt low-level construals.
Keywords: prosocial behavior, construal level, well-being, volunteerism
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Most of us can readily recall committing to some future prosocial action—planning to
help build homes for the poor, agreeing to serve meals at a soup kitchen, or pledging to donate
money—only to find our enthusiasm substantially dampened when the moment of sacrifice
arises. And we suspect that although most of us admire those who help others—and may feel
quite positive about our own past prosocial behaviors—we also recall personally avoiding
opportunities or requests to help others in the present: Crossing the street to avoid charity
collector, averting our gaze from the beggar on the street, inventing an excuse to avoid helping a
friend move across town. These discrepant perspectives on prosocial action present something of
a puzzle. Why would people admire and value prosocial actions that they themselves try to avoid
in the here and now? Better understanding the answer to this question is important because,
among other things, prosocial behavior makes people happy and avoiding it could reduce
happiness.
Prosocial behavior increases people’s positive affect, happiness, and satisfaction with life
(e.g., Dunn, Aknin & Norton, 2008; Lyubomirsky, Sheldon & Schkade, 2005; Thoits & Hewitt,
2001; Weinstein & Ryan, 2010). Spending as little as five dollars on someone else increases
happiness more than spending the same amount on oneself (Dunn et al., 2008). The emotional
benefits of prosocial actions emerge across cultures (Aknin et al., 2013) and are present in the
early years of life (Aknin, Broesch & Hamlin, under review; Aknin, Hamlin & Dunn, 2012),
suggesting that prosocial benefits are a human universal. The contrast between people’s
avoidance of prosocial actions and prosocial behavior’s benefits to well-being raises the question
of what influences beliefs about how much prosocial actions contribute to well-being.
Although prosocial actions clearly increase happiness, it is less clear whether people fully
recognize their benefits. On the one hand, people generally believe that helping others has a
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positive impact on their mood (Harris, 1977). On the other hand, when Dunn and colleagues
(2008) asked a sample of students whether they thought they would be happier spending five or
twenty dollars on themselves or someone else, most people thought that spending on themselves
would make them happier than spending on others. Beliefs about the benefits of prosocial
behavior are important because such beliefs guide decisions about engaging in prosocial actions
(Gilbert, 2006; Gilbert & Wilson, 2000; Read & Loewenstein, 1995; Wilson & Gilbert, 2005).
People may pursue prosocial actions when they believe those actions increase personal well-
being, and avoid prosocial actions when they do not.
We hypothesize that the level at which people construe prosocial action influences their
beliefs about how much those actions will contribute to personal well-being. Specifically, we
suggest that abstract construals of prosocial actions, which emphasize an action’s deep
underlying meaning, cause people to forecast greater contributions to personal well-being
compared with concrete construals, which emphasize the specific episodic details of prosocial
actions. Abstract construal highlights the positive attributes of prosocial actions—enacting
admired, valued, “good” activities—while minimizing negative attributes of prosocial actions—
the discomfort and personal sacrifice often associated with prosocial action. When people
construe prosocial actions abstractly rather than concretely they better appreciate that personal
sacrifice in the service of helping others increases happiness. We derive our hypothesis from
two ideas.
First, construal level theory describes how people represent actions differently at high
versus low levels of construal, and that higher level construal typically increases with distance
(Bar-Anan, Liberman & Trope, 2006; Trope & Liberman, 2003, 2010; Trope, Liberman &
Wakslak, 2007). Higher level construals emphasize the abstract, central, long-term meaning of
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events, minimizing the concrete, contextual, short-term details of those events. Lower level
construals, in contrast, emphasize the concrete, contextual, short-term details of events,
minimizing the abstract, central, long term meaning of those events.
Second, prosocial actions, such as donating blood, are characterized by highly favorable
abstract features and less favorable, sometimes unpleasant, concrete features (Henrich &
Henrich, 2006). Spending a weekend day helping clean up a community following a natural
disaster can be unpleasant as a concrete enactment of shoveling muck from flooded houses, yet
deeply satisfying as an enactment of helping others. Similarly, donating money to a homeless
woman can be painful in the moment as it entails parting with cash that could be used to
purchase a double-tall-vanilla-latte (Prelec & Loewenstein, 1998), yet bolster one’s self concept
as a caring, virtuous person. Indeed, people seem to believe, in the abstract, that prosocial
behaviors are better when they entail personal suffering rather than personal enjoyment (Olivola
& Shafir, 2013).
These two ideas—that people construe events at higher or lower levels and that prosocial
actions have more favorable abstract attributes than concrete attributes—imply that people
appreciate the emotional benefits of prosocial actions when they construe the prosocial actions
abstractly rather than concretely. Some indirect support for this prediction is the discrepancy
between people’s general beliefs that helping others leads to emotional benefits (Harris, 1977)
and their beliefs that spending on themselves is more enjoyable than spending on others (Dunn et
al., 2008). People also overestimate how likely they would be to engage in altruistic behavior
that is hypothetical or in the distant future—hypotheticality and distance both being forms of
psychological distance—suggesting that people value prosocial actions more in the abstract than
in the concrete (Epley & Dunning, 2000). By the same token, people evaluate others who avoid
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helping more negatively when the avoidance is in the distant future (and presumably construed
abstractly) than in the near future (and presumably construed concretely, Agerstrom &
Bjorklund, 2009).
We report two experiments that examine whether abstract construal increases the
expected emotional benefits of prosocial behavior more than concrete construal. We first
conducted a field experiment with volunteers travelling to New Orleans, LA, to assist in cleaning
up debris following Hurricane Katrina. In Experiment 2, participants considered hypothetical
donations of small or large amount. In both experiments, we experimentally manipulated
whether people construed the prosocial action abstractly or concretely. We predicted that
abstract construal would increase people’s expected emotional benefits relative to concrete
construal (in both experiments), and that this effect would be larger when the prosocial action
entailed greater personal sacrifice (Experiment 2).
Experiment 1: Hurricane Katrina Volunteers
Method
Twenty-seven volunteers (16 female, Mage = 25.15 years, SD = 9.26 years) were recruited
in Spring 2006 through organizations coordinating Hurricane Katrina relief trips. Participants
had committed to traveling to New Orleans to work in support of relief efforts through both
secular and faith-based organizations. Trips ranged from a few days to a full week.
Volunteers completed an online survey in which they were randomly assigned to think
about their upcoming experience from either a concrete or abstract perspective. In the concrete
construal condition (n = 13), participants were asked to imagine their trip to New Orleans and
“think fully about the concrete details of the activity, such as what you specifically will do and
how you will do it.” In the abstract construal condition (n = 14), participants were asked to
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“think about the general, global meaning of your efforts in New Orleans, including the abstract
meaning and the consequences it could have.” Participants then described their thoughts about
the upcoming trip.
To measure how much participants expected the volunteer activity to contribute value
and meaning to their lives, we asked them to forecast how much the experience would contribute
to their life satisfaction (1 = not at all; 5 = very much) and to rate how satisfied they were with
their decision to volunteer (1 = very dissatisfied; 5 = very satisfied), which we averaged into an
index of expected impact on life satisfaction (r = .74).
Results and Discussion
To examine whether construal level influenced participants’ expectations about the
volunteer activity, we analyzed ratings of positive impact with an analysis of variance
(ANOVA). As predicted, participants who wrote an abstract description of their volunteer
experience predicted greater life satisfaction and were more satisfied with their decision (M =
4.54, SD = .66) than did participants who wrote a concrete description (M = 3.97, SD = .77), F(1,
25) = 4.28, p = .049, partial η2 = .15. Because the small sample size may call into question
assumptions of normality, we also conducted a nonparametric Kruskal-Wallis ranks test, which
was significant, χ2 = 4.52, p = .03. Abstract construal thus led people to forecast greater
satisfaction with prosocial actions than concrete construal.
Two observations should be borne in mind when evaluating this experiment. First, the
small sample size (N = 27) means that the experiment has correspondingly small statistical
power. This means that our study could only have detected a large effect.
Second, this context is a conservative test of our hypothesis given that all participants had
already chosen to help those affected by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and presumably
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believed that the trip would be beneficial. Even for this self-selected group, a minimal construal
manipulation affected their anticipated emotional benefits from volunteering.
Experiment 2: Construal Level Manipulation
We next sought to examine whether the anticipated emotional benefits of prosocial action
are larger when the prosocial action entails greater personal sacrifice. One alternative
interpretation of Experiment 1’s results is that abstract construal causes people to forecast that
any activity would increase their happiness. Our hypothesis, in contrast, is that abstract construal
heightens the value of prosocial actions that require personal sacrifice, which would otherwise
detract from the satisfaction gleaned from prosocial actions.
Method
Two-hundred eleven individuals (76 female, Mage = 30.0 years, SD = 10.2 years)
completed this study online through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service in exchange for a small
monetary payment. Seventeen of these participants were excluded from analyses because they
failed a simple memory question about their condition assignment; this left a final sample of one-
hundred ninety four participants (70 female, Mage = 30.1 years, SD = 10.0 years).
Participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions in a 2 (construal level:
abstract vs. concrete) × 2 (personal sacrifice: high/$7 donation vs. low/$3 donation) design.
Specifically, participants were asked to read the following scenario:
Please imagine that you have volunteered to take part in an experiment at a local
community centre. You enter a quiet room and take a seat at a table. You are given a
letter sized envelope containing ten one-dollar bills. You are asked to decide how much
of the ten dollar sum you would like to keep for yourself and how much (if any) of this
ten dollar sum you would like to give to another person—someone you have not met and
who has not received any money. After a few minutes, you decide to keep $3 ($7) for
yourself and give $7 ($3) to the other person. You place the $3 ($7) in your wallet and
put the $7 ($3) for the other person in the envelope labeled “for the recipient.”
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To manipulate construal level, participants were asked to think about their decision from
either an abstract or concrete perspective, and to describe their thoughts in a text box.
Participants in the abstract construal condition (n =96) were asked to consider the importance
and meaning of their decision, how this decision fits into their life’s past and future experiences,
and how they would feel when looking back on this decision later in life. Participants in the
concrete construal condition (n = 98) were asked to think about their decision from a concrete
perspective and consider the details of their decision, such as exactly what they might think
about, as well as the specific contents of their thoughts and feelings.
Participants were then asked predict how happy they would feel after making their
monetary decision (1 = Not at all happy; 7 = Extremely happy). Finally, participants provided
their demographic information (e.g., education level, household income, age, gender, and
ethnicity).
Results and Discussion
To investigate whether construal level influenced the expected emotional rewards of
offering large and small donations, we submitted happiness forecasts to a 2 (construal level:
abstract vs. concrete) × 2 (personal sacrifice: high/$7 donation vs. low/$3 donation) ANOVA. As
predicted, there was a significant interaction indicating that happiness forecasts of large and
small donations were dependent on construal level, F(1, 190) = 3.81, p = .05, η2 = .02 (see Figure
1). When participants imagined donating a larger amount ($7), those assigned to the abstract
construal condition forecasted greater happiness (M = 5.31, SD = 1.55) than participants in the
concrete construal condition (M = 4.61, SD = 1.65), F(1, 190) = 5.02, p = .03, η2 = .03. In
contrast, when participants imagined donating a smaller amount ($3), those assigned to the
abstract construal condition did not forecast greater happiness (M = 4.65, SD = 1.52) than
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participants in the concrete construal condition (M = 4.81, SD = 1.42), F(1, 190) = .25, p = .62 η2
= .001. Thus, abstract construal increased the anticipated emotional benefits of prosocial action
more relative to concrete construal when the action entailed larger personal sacrifice.
General Discussion
The results of two experiments indicate that abstract construal increases the anticipated
emotional benefits of prosocial actions relative to concrete construal. In both real-world
(Experiment 1) and hypothetical (Experiment 2) prosocial behavior scenarios, people who
construed a costly helpful behavior abstractly predicted that the act would be more meaningful
and rewarding than when they considered the behavior concretely. And the effect of construal
was larger when the prosocial action entailed greater personal sacrifice (Experiment 2).
These findings align with previous research and offer one explanation for why people
may appreciate the value of prosocial behavior in the distant future but avoid opportunities to
offer assistance in the present. Future events are construed at a more abstract level, emphasizing
the central, deep, long-term meaning of events (Trope & Liberman, 2003, 2010), making it easier
for people to appreciate how their personal efforts will help others and improve their well-being.
In contrast, immediate and near-term events are construed at a more concrete level, emphasizing
the concrete, contextual, short-term details of events, which increase the salience of personal
costs involved in helping others.
Although our experiments concerned the anticipated emotional benefits of future
prosocial actions, we believe the same pattern would emerge for past events as well. People
report greater experienced happiness when they reflect upon a time they spent money on others
in the past than when thinking about spending the same amount of money on themselves (Aknin
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et al., 2013; Aknin, Dunn & Norton, 2012). We suspect that reflecting on past prosocial actions
either abstractly or concretely would moderate people’s perceptions of these emotional benefits.
One limitation of the present work is the low number of participants in Experiment 1. It is
worth noting, however, that the sample included the maximum number of volunteers we were
able to recruit before the trip, and did not reflect early stoppage of data collection having attained
statistical significance. If anything, the limited sample size reduced our statistical power, which
made detection of a significant effect more difficult. Obviously, we sought the largest possible
sample, and would have preferred a larger sample. Such are the realities of experiments in the
field that larger samples are sometimes beyond reach.
Another limitation to our conclusions is the hypothetical nature of the donation in
Experiment 2, which raises the question of whether the results would also emerge with real
prosocial donations. Nevertheless, the converging evidence from Experiments 1 and 2 suggest
that participants anticipated emotional rewards of generous actions as they would have for a real
event.
Future research could address these limitations by conducting large experiments with real
helping opportunities. For instance, researchers could randomly assign students in a large
introductory class to consider the concrete or abstract consequences of providing aid before
inviting students to volunteer their time or money to a timely and worthy cause. Afterward,
researchers could examine actual helping (akin to Nelson & Norton, 2005) as well as the
predicted impact of helping on happiness. Based on the findings presented here, we would expect
that students assigned to consider their aid in an abstract (vs. concrete) manner would be more
likely to provide assistance and anticipate greater emotional rewards from doing so. Moving
beyond student populations, it would also be fruitful to investigate the impact of abstract and
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concrete construals on actual charitable donations. Researchers could consider partnering with
professional fundraisers and compare framing manipulations at large scale fundraising
campaigns (see Grant, 2008). These investigations could provide larger, real-world extensions of
the promising findings documented here.
Finally, we believe that our results suggest an intervention that could be used to prompt
and sustain prosocial behavior. To the extent that people avoid or cease prosocial actions
because of concrete costs, inviting people to construe those actions abstractly could help them
persist at prosocial actions that have enduring personal and social benefits.
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Figure 1. Expected emotional rewards for small ($3) and large ($7) donations as a function of
construal level in Study 2.
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