How people consider unchosen options shapes how they interpret what they did choose. Extending previous research showing that foregone alternatives influences consumers’ experiences of a chosen option, the current research explores how the diversity of foregone alternatives impacts perceived goal progress and subsequent decisions about goal persistence. Specifically, we find that when consumers consider dissimilar (vs. similar) goal-inconsistent alternatives that they could have chosen instead of the goal-consistent actions they did take, they believe that they have achieved more progress towards their active goals. As a result, they are then more likely to subsequently make goal-consistent choices. However, considering dissimilar (vs. similar) unchosen options only impacts goal perceptions when participants actively endorsed the focal goal. Our findings hold across different types of goals (saving vs. spending: study 1, donating vs. spending: study 2, healthy vs. tasty food: studies 3 to 5), and extend to real choices (study 5).  

Kim, Hye-young, and Ann L. McGill, “Doing good to things, then bad to people: When anthropomorphism makes people selfish,” under review, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Prior research has shown that when a target is anthropomorphized, it is seen as a moral patient capable of conscious experience, and, as a consequence, people tend to show higher concern for it. We posit, however, that initial positive behavior toward the humanized entity may ultimately lead to negative consequences because moral agents perceive themselves as having earned higher moral credit from their actions, which frees them from later behaving positively either in a prosocial or moral way. Three studies explored the effect of someone acting in a moral fashion toward an anthropomorphized entity on their subsequent behavior toward real people. Findings show that after doing good deeds (e.g., signing a petition for an environmental charity) for an anthropomorphized (vs. non-anthropomorphized) target, actors relieved themselves of future obligations to behave positively toward others. However, participants showed less subsequent social behaviors only when they attributed their initial positive action to moral reasons, supporting the hypothesis that the degradation in positive social behavior resulted from participants perceiving themselves to have earned higher moral credit when acting positively toward an anthropomorphized entity. When people were induced to attribute their initial positive action to non-moral reasons (e.g., self-interest), anthropomorphizing a target led to more positive social intentions toward other people.