A growing body of work suggests that people are sensitive to moral framing in economic games involving prosociality, suggesting that people hold moral preferences for doing the “right thing”. What gives rise to these preferences? Here, we evaluate the explanatory power of a reputation-based account, which proposes that people respond to moral frames because they are motivated to look good in the eyes of others. Across four pre-registered experiments (total N = 9601), we investigated whether reputational incentives amplify sensitivity to framing effects. Studies 1–3 manipulated (i) whether moral or neutral framing was used to describe a Trade-Off Game (in which participants chose between prioritizing equality or efficiency) and (ii) whether Trade-Off Game choices were observable to a social partner in a subsequent Trust Game. These studies found that observability does not significantly amplify sensitivity to moral framing. Study 4 ruled out the alternative explanation that the observability manipulation from Studies 1–3 is too weak to influence behavior. In Study 4, the same observability manipulation did significantly amplify sensitivity to normative information (about what others see as moral in the Trade-Off Game). Together, these results suggest that moral frames may tap into moral preferences that are relatively deeply internalized, such that the power of moral frames is not strongly enhanced by making the morally-framed behavior observable to others.

越来越多的工作表明，人们对涉及亲社会的经济游戏中的道德框架敏感，表明人们对做“正确的事情”抱有道德偏好。是什么引起了这些偏好？在这里，我们评估了基于信誉的帐户的解释力，该解释力建议人们响应道德框架，因为他们被激励在他人眼中看起来很好。跨四个预先注册的实验（总计N = 9601），我们调查了声誉激励是否会放大对框架效应的敏感性。研究1-3操纵（i）是使用道德框架还是中立框架来描述权衡博弈（参与者在优先考虑平等或效率之间进行选择），以及（ii）权衡博弈的选择对于社会伙伴而言是否可观察到。随后的信任游戏。这些研究发现，可观察性不会显着增加对道德框架的敏感性。研究4排除了另一种解释，即研究1-3中的可观察性操作太弱而无法影响行为。在研究4中，相同的可观察性操作确实大大增强了对规范信息的敏感性（关于他人在权衡博弈中认为是道德的）。总之，这些结果表明，道德框架可以利用相对较内在的道德偏好，因此，通过使他人能够观察到道德框架的行为，道德框架的力量不会得到很大增强。