A preview of this full-text is provided by American Psychological Association.
Content available from Journal of Experimental Psychology General
This content is subject to copyright. Terms and conditions apply.
Endorsing Help For Others That You Oppose For Yourself: Mind
Perception Alters the Perceived Effectiveness of Paternalism
Juliana Schroeder
University of California, Berkeley
Adam Waytz
Northwestern University
Nicholas Epley
University of Chicago
How people choose to help each other can be just as important as how much people help. Help can come
through relatively paternalistic or agentic aid. Paternalistic aid, such as banning certain foods to
encourage weight loss or donating food to alleviate poverty, restricts recipients’ choices compared with
agentic aid, such as providing calorie counts or donating cash. Nine experiments demonstrate that how
people choose to help depends partly on their beliefs about the recipient’s mental capacities. People
perceive paternalistic aid to be more effective for those who seem less mentally capable (Experiments 1
and 2), and people therefore give more paternalistically when others are described as relatively
incompetent (Experiment 3). Because people tend to believe that they are more mentally capable than are
others, people also believe that paternalistic aid will be more effective for others than for oneself,
effectively treating other adults more like children (Experiments 4a–5b). Experiencing a personal mental
shortcoming— overeating on Thanksgiving—therefore increased the perceived effectiveness of pater-
nalism for oneself, such that participants thought paternalistic antiobesity policies would be more
effective when surveyed the day after Thanksgiving than the day before (Experiment 6). A final
experiment demonstrates that the link between perceived effectiveness of aid and mental capacity is
bidirectional: Those receiving paternalistic aid were perceived as less mentally capable than those
receiving relatively agentic aid (Experiment 7). Beliefs about how best to help someone in need are
affected by subtle inferences about the mind of the person in need.
Keywords: paternalism, mind perception, mental capacity, judgment, policy
Supplemental materials: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000320.supp
As members of a highly interdependent species, people not only
try to improve their own well-being, but also try to improve others’
well-being. People can choose to help themselves and others in
various ways. A person can give books to a poor student, or give
cash that the student could use to buy whatever is needed most. A
government agency can help its citizens lose weight by banning
large sugary drinks, or by providing clearer calorie information
about large sugary drinks. These options vary in how paternalis-
tically they treat the recipient. Providing or banning specific goods
is more paternalistic because it restricts the recipient’s choice
compared with giving cash or information. Not all forms of aid, of
course, are equally effective, meaning that how people choose to
help may be just as important as how much people choose to help.
We propose that how people help depends partly on subtle
inferences about the minds of those being helped. Specifically, we
predict that paternalistic aid will seem more effective for those
perceived to have weaker mental capacities. This prediction has
five important implications. First, to the extent that the perceived
effectiveness of aid guides actual decisions about aid, people will
be more likely to choose paternalistic forms of aid for those
described as less mentally capable. For instance, giving food to
someone in need (a relatively paternalistic form of help) should
seem more effective than simply giving cash (a relatively agentic
form of help) when the needy person seems less mentally capable.
Second, how much people give is guided by the magnitude of a
person’s need (Cuddy, Rock, & Norton, 2007;Levine, Prosser,
Evans, & Reicher, 2005;Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Weth-
erell, 1987), meaning that decisions about how to give versus how
much to give may be guided by different mechanisms. Third,
because people tend to believe that they are more mentally capable
than others (see Waytz, Schroeder, & Epley, 2014, for a review),
people will believe paternalistic policies are more effective for
others than for themselves, partially explaining public resistance to
This article was published Online First May 29, 2017.
Juliana Schroeder, Haas School of Business, University of California,
Berkeley; Adam Waytz, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern
University; Nicholas Epley, Booth School of Business, University of
Chicago.
We thank Mike Bremmer, Jasmine Kwong, Alex Kristal, Uriel Heller,
Katie Matteson, Adam Picker, Megan Porter, Michael Rosenblum, Jenna
Rozelle, Nia Sotto, and Sherry Tseng for assistance conducting experi-
ments and the Booth School of Business and Haas School of Business for
financial support.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Juliana
Schroeder, Haas School of Business, University of California, 2220 Pied-
mont Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94720. E-mail: jschroeder@haas.berkeley
.edu
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General © 2017 American Psychological Association
2017, Vol. 146, No. 8, 1106–1125 0096-3445/17/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000320
1106