Prosocials were more optimistic about the future of morally good (than bad) agents, while individualists were not; this was driven by prosocials’ failure to update beliefs from undesirable information about morally good agents

Zheng, Shuying, Xinyuan Yan, Jenifer Siegel, Vladimir Chituc, Shiyi Li, Molly Crockett, and Yina Ma. 2020. “Self-serving Karmic Beliefs: Prosociality Influences Vicarious Optimism.” PsyArXiv. January 2. doi:10.31234/osf.io/ecqgf

Abstract: Belief in karma is ubiquitous, appearing early in development and impacting prosocial behavior. Here, we tested the possibility that karmic beliefs are self-serving: are “good” people more likely to believe that good things happen to good people? Study 1 (n=170) showed stronger karmic beliefs in more prosocial individuals. Next, we tested whether self-serving karmic beliefs arose from a motivated deployment of vicarious optimism: prosocial individuals adopt karmic beliefs by prioritizing desirable (the fortunes of good people, the misfortunes of bad people) over undesirable information when predicting the future. Study 2 (n=107) showed that prosocials were more optimistic about the future of morally good (than bad) agents, while individualists were not. This was driven by prosocials’ failure to update beliefs from undesirable information about morally good agents. Together, we suggest that karmic beliefs are self-serving, and result from a failure to update beliefs from information that conflicts with a karmic worldview.

Discussion

Karma denotes the belief that good things will happen to people who have done good deeds, while misfortunes will befall bad people in the future. In the current studies, combining the moral character learning and vicarious belief update tasks, we are able to quantify the beliefs about the future of people who have done objectively good or bad deeds. We show that individuals hold optimistic beliefs about the future of good people and discount undesirable feedback when predicting their futures. In contrast, individuals similarly incorporate desirable and undesirable feedback into their beliefs about bad people’s futures. These results suggest that vicarious optimism is one possible cognitive mechanism that gives rise to karmic beliefs. Furthermore, we show that prosocial individuals (relative to individualists) hold stronger karmic beliefs and stronger vicarious optimism for good relative to bad people, suggesting that karmic beliefs are self-serving: good people more likely to believe that good things happen to good people.

We provide evidence for a correlation between prosociality and karmic beliefs. However, the causal direction of this relationship remains open to discussion, and is likely bidirectional. Previous studies showed that priming of karmic beliefs increased generosity and prosocial behavior (White, Kelly, Shariff, & Norenzayan, 2019), suggesting that karmic beliefs may be a precursor to prosocial behavior. However, studies developmental work suggests that prosocial behavior may emerge earlier than karmic beliefs; preverbal infants (6-10 months) show disapproval of antisocial behavior (Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007) and infants between 12 and 24 months exhibit prosocial behaviors (Brownell, 2013), whereas karmic beliefs have only been demonstrated in 4-6-year-old children (Banerjee & Bloom, 2013, 2017). Thus, it may also be the case that prosociality promotes the development of karmic beliefs. Prosocial behavior is often costly (Crocker, Canevello, & Brown, 2017). Karmic beliefs that morally good behavior will be rewarded could provide one type of justification for these costs and serve as a psychological compensation (Bäckman & Dixon, 1992). In addition, helping others also brings positive “side effects” (Carlson & Zaki, 2018), such as positive feelings (Aknin, Van de Vondervoort, & Hamlin, 2018) and social praise (Eisenberg, Wolchik, Goldberg, & Engel, 1992). Thus over time, the beliefs that performing good deeds increases the chance of future desirable outcomes may be reinforced into a karmic worldview.

People hold karmic beliefs in both first-party and third-party contexts (Hafer & Olson, 1989). If prosocials and individualists hold karmic beliefs to a similar extent, we might expect strong optimistic belief updating for the self in prosocials, and pessimistic belief updating for the self in individualists. However, we observed that prosocials and individualists were similarly optimistic about their own futures. One potential explanation is that the wishful thinking for oneself outweighs karmic believes when there are any conflicts (Mata & Simão, 2019). Alternatively, individualists may not identify themselves as “bad people” given vast evidence that most people tend to view themselves in a positive light (Sanitioso & Wlodarski, 2004). Thus, it is possible that individualists believe in karma but view themselves as good people who deserve an optimistic future. Given that we found weaker karmic beliefs in individualists, the finding of similar optimistic beliefs for the self in individualists and prosocials would lend further support to our hypothesis that karmic beliefs are self-serving, so that strong karmic beliefs motivates prosocial individuals to believe in a bright future (possibly caused by the good deeds they did). Taken together, this suggests that the self-serving nature of karmic beliefs applies to both the self and other people.

In current study, individualists not only failed to show asymmetric vicarious optimism towards good and bad agents; they also did not show vicarious optimism at all. Consistent with previous findings that individualists maximize the differences between the self and others in allocating monetary reward (Haruno & Frith, 2010; Liu et al., 2019) or responding to painful stimuli (Singer et al., 2008), individualists also differentiate optimistic future beliefs toward the self and others (only showing optimism towards self, but not to others: t(50) = 2.35, p = 0.023, 95% CI = [0.58, 7.43], Cohen d’ = 0.33). Taken together, this suggests individualists prefer to maximize self-other differences not only in material outcomes (i.e., monetary allocation, physical pain) but also in immaterial beliefs about the future.

One limitation of our second study is that we only provide evidence for ‘half’ of the karmic worldview, i.e., that good things will happen to good people; we did not observe evidence for beliefs that bad things will happen to bad people. Even prosocials who showed stronger karmic beliefs did not express pessimistic beliefs about bad agents. This might be due to that, in prosocials’ karmic belief system, good things not happening is already a type of punishment for the bad people, given that prosocial generally care about others and prefer not to do harm to others (Penner., Dovidio., Piliavin., & Schroeder., 2005), thus prosocials do not predict bad consequence for morally bad people. Indeed, the current sample, we found evidence that prosocials showed stronger harm aversion in the moral decision task where they trade off profit for themselves against pain for another person (harm aversion: prosocials vs. individualists, t(101) = 4.39, p < 0.001, 95% CI = [0.11, 0.29], Cohen d’ = 0.43).

In conclusion, the current study provides a novel framework to decipher the cognitive processes that give rise to karmic beliefs, and further proposes that karmic beliefs may be subject to self-serving motivations. Our findings suggest that karmic beliefs – a feature of many religious traditions – may be a key component of a positive feedback loop between beliefs and behavior that together contribute to large-scale cooperation.