When researchers ask about behavior in ethical contexts such as charitable giving, they sometimes use indirect questions (e.g., “what would another student donate?”), to allow people to project their actual desires onto the other without social desirability concerns. Despite their prevalence, there is a surfeit of research on whether indirect measures reflect actual behavior better than direct questions (e.g., “how much would you donate”). We addressed this study question, focusing on sensitivity accuracy, which is whether the measure moves up or down as actual behavior does. To measure sensitivity, we elicited direct, indirect, and actual monetary donations from each respondent. Across four studies, and many controls and manipulations, direct measures were significantly more sensitive than indirect measures. Our findings argue for caution in the use of indirect measures of prosocial behavior and also appear to rule out projection as the only/primary driver of indirect responses. Happily, though, these results provide a potential bright spot for researchers: with some minor guidelines and adjustments, direct measures can be, we argue, profitably used to estimate actual behavior in ethical domains.

中文翻译：

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为自己与他人作答：对慈善捐款的直接或间接估计

当研究人员询问诸如慈善捐赠之类的道德背景下的行为时，他们有时会使用间接问题（例如，“另一名学生会捐赠什么？”），使人们可以将自己的实际愿望投射到另一个上，而不会引起社会可取性的担忧。尽管它们很普遍，但是关于间接措施是否比直接问题更好地反映实际行为（例如，“您将捐赠多少”）的研究很多。我们解决了这个研究问题，重点是灵敏度准确性，这是指指标是根据实际行为向上还是向下移动。为了衡量敏感性，我们从每个受访者那里获得了直接，间接和实际的金钱捐赠。在四项研究以及许多控制和操作中，直接措施比间接措施要敏感得多。我们的发现主张在使用亲社会行为的间接测度时要谨慎，并且似乎也排除了投射是间接反应的唯一/主要驱动力。令人高兴的是，这些结果为研究人员提供了潜在的亮点：通过一些小的指导和调整，我们认为直接措施可以有益地用于评估道德领域的实际行为。