Morality meets risk: What makes a good excuse for selfishness

Prior work finds that individuals are often less prosocial when they can exploit uncertainty as an excuse. In contrast to prior work that largely explores the relevance of excuses in the gain domain, this paper investigates the relevance of excuses in both the loss and gain domains. In our laboratory experiment, participants evaluated risky payoffs for themselves and their partners in either the gain or loss domain, with or without interpersonal trade-offs. We found that participants exhibited excuse-driven risk behaviors in both domains. We also documented significant individual heterogeneity in the degree of excuses, influenced by factors such as individuals’ risk preferences, beliefs about others’ risk preferences, and the size of the risk. We present a self-signaling model that incorporates self-image concerns to explain our experimental findings. We show that excuse-driven risk behavior arises because people misattribute their selfish behavior to risk preferences rather than a reduced level of altruism.