ReviewEvolutionary human sciences2021
No good deed goes unpunished: the social costs of prosocial behaviour.
Review in Evolutionary human sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cost-free charity facilitates dishonesty in a dice-rolling experiment.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The Evolutionary Psychology of Breaking Informal Versus Formal Contracts: Effects of Group Size and Area of Upbringing.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Estimated costs and benefits of participation in an extreme ritual in Mauritius.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Unveiling the veil: exploring how wellbeing motivations shape anonymous and public prosocial behavior in Indonesia.BMC psychology · 2024Article
- Acting without considering personal costs signals trustworthiness in helpers but not punishers.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Religiosity and gender bias structure social networks.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Virtue Discounting: Observability Reduces Moral Actors' Perceived Virtue.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2023Article
- Four Puzzles of Reputation-Based Cooperation : Content, Process, Honesty, and Structure.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2022Article
- Third-party punishers do not compete to be chosen as partners in an experimental game.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Positive Sentiment and the Donation Amount: Social Norms in Crowdfunding Donations During the COVID-19 Pandemic.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- The tainted altruism effect: a successful pre-registered replication.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- The benefits of being seen to help others: indirect reciprocity and reputation-based partner choice.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Correlates of conflict resolution across cultures.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
- Green and Generous: Virtue Signaling Environmentalism and Community-Mindedness from an Evolutionary Perspective.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behaviorArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Performing costly helpful behaviours can allow individuals to improve their reputation. Those who gain a good reputation are often preferred as interaction partners and are consequently better able to access support through cooperative relationships with others. However, investing in prosocial displays can sometimes yield social costs: excessively generous individuals risk losing their good reputation, and even being vilified, ostracised or antisocially punished. As a consequence, people frequently try to downplay their prosocial actions or hide them from others. In this review, we explore when and why investments in prosocial behaviour are likely to yield social costs. We propose two key features of interactions that make it more likely that generous individuals will incur social costs when: (a) observers infer that helpful behaviour is motivated by strategic or selfish motives; and (b) observers infer that helpful behaviour is detrimental to them. We describe how the cognition required to consider ulterior motives emerges over development and how these tendencies vary across cultures - and discuss how the potential for helpful actions to result in social costs might place boundaries on prosocial behaviour as well as limiting the contexts in which it might occur. We end by outlining the key avenues and priorities for future research.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.