Doing Good and Getting Worse: The Dilemma of Social Policy

Tainted altruism: when doing some good is evaluated as worse than doing no good at all.

In four experiments, we found that the presence of self-interest in the charitable domain was seen as tainting: People evaluated efforts that realized both charitable and personal benefits as worse than analogous behaviors that produced no charitable benefit. This tainted-altruism effect was observed in a variety of contexts and extended to both moral evaluations of other agents and participant...

Doing Good, Being Good, and the Social Construction of Compassion

Corporate Social Responsibility: Doing Well by Doing Good?

We provide a framework for analyzing corporate social responsibility (CSR). Our model of CSR in this paper has two important ingredients – CSR is at least in part a profit motivated decision; and different CSR activities are aimed at different audiences. We examine the implications of our framework using a ‘visible’ CSR index that captures consumeroriented CSR. We find that CSR is more prevalen...

Is the Patient Getting Worse?

Glaucoma care today is often simplified into all or nothing terms with the assumption that if the patient's intraocular pressure (IOP) is above a certain level, glaucomatous disease will progress and when the IOP is lowered to below a threshold, no further progression will occur. This dogma is largely the result of limitations in the resolution of tools currently available to judge progression....

Doing Better by Getting Worse: Posthypnotic Amnesia Improves Random Number Generation

Although forgetting is often regarded as a deficit that we need to control to optimize cognitive functioning, it can have beneficial effects in a number of contexts. We examined whether disrupting memory for previous numerical responses would attenuate repetition avoidance (the tendency to avoid repeating the same number) during random number generation and thereby improve the randomness of res...