Goal
If altruism could be defined as giving beyond self-interest, further research could be undertaken to create priming strategies or better devise environmental and situational factors to facilitate altruistic thinking, decision making, and giving. The study evaluates participant's willingness to donate time to charity or to risk modest amounts of money for the sake of charity and examines the relationship between measures of altruism related to measures of regulatory focus, especially promotion focus (discrepancy between ones aspirations and ones present self) and prevention focus (discrepancy between ones obligation and ones present self). By analyzing each participant's choices against their corresponding personality variables, risk assessment, and strategic goal implementation we can better understand patterns and mediators of altruistic behavior.

Background
In terms of behavioral economic theory, especially game theory, the concept of altruism is nearly impenetrable. We know, people have multiple goals when they donate money to charity, and many of them are self-interested, which can be explained by multiple social psychological and game theories, but what sparked my passion for this genre of research was the existence of the contrary: That altruism could be defined as giving beyond self-interest. This experiment addresses a five factor model that isolates the psychologically motivating factors to facilitate altruistic decision making. This experiment is designed to isolate a linear regression equation for this "pure altruism".

Participants are asked to respond to a series of vignettes describing different situations, each with a choice to be made. The situations are structured parametrically so that each participant's response sequence can be modeled quantitatively. The importance weights obtained serve to characterize the degree of altruism in terms of trade offs among multiple goals or attributes. Participants also complete several standard questionnaires that assess regulatory focus. After completing the questionnaires they are asked if they wish to donate part or all of their earnings to a chosen charity.

Last Updated: June 1, 2006