Policy makers, employers, and insurers often provide financial incentives to encourage citizens, employees, and customers to take actions that are good for them or for society (e.g., energy conservation, healthy living, safe driving). Although financial incentives are often effective at inducing good behavior, they’ve been shown to have self-image costs: Those who receive incentives view their actions less positively due to the perceived incompatibility between financial incentives and intrinsic motives. We test an intervention that allows organizations and individuals to resolve this tension: We use financial rewards to kick-start good behavior and then offer individuals the opportunity to give up some or all of their earned financial rewards in order to boost their self-image. Two preregistered studies—an incentivized online experiment (n = 763) on prosocial behavior and a large field experiment (n = 17,968) on exercise—provide evidence that emphasizing the intrinsic rewards of a past action leads individuals to forgo or donate earned financial rewards. Our intervention allows individuals to retroactively signal that they acted for the right reason, which we call “motivation laundering.” We discuss the implications of motivation laundering for the design of incentive systems and behavioral change.

决策者，雇主和保险公司通常会提供经济激励措施，以鼓励公民，雇员和客户采取对他们或社会有益的行动（例如节能，健康生活，安全驾驶）。尽管财务激励通常可以有效地诱发良好的行为，但事实证明，这样做会产生自我形象损失：由于财务激励与内在动机之间的不相容性，获得激励的人对自己的行为不太满意。我们测试了一项干预措施，该干预措施可以使组织和个人解决这种紧张关系：我们使用财务奖励来启动良好的行为，然后为个人提供放弃他们所获得的部分或全部财务奖励的机会，以提高他们的自我形象。两项预先注册的研究-激励性在线实验（亲社会行为的n = 763）和运动中的大范围实验（n = 17,968）–提供的证据表明，强调过去行为的内在奖励会导致个人放弃或捐赠获得的经济奖励。我们的干预措施使个人可以追溯性地发出信号，表明他们出于正确的理由而采取了行动，我们称之为“动机洗钱”。我们讨论了洗钱对激励系统和行为改变设计的影响。