Conscience Accounting: Emotion Dynamics and Social Behavior

The paper reports the results of two experiments in which people who first made an immoral choice were then more likely to donate to charity than those who did not. In addition, those who knew that a donation opportunity would follow the potential moral transgression were more likely to behave immorally than those who were not told of the donation option. We interpret this increase in charitable behavior as being driven by a temporal increase in guilt induced by past immoral actions. We term such behavior conscience accounting, and discuss its importance in charitable giving. JEL classification: D03, D06, D09