Voluntary contributions to public goods: A multi-disciplinary examination of prosocial behavior and its antecedents

The four essays collected in this Ph.D. dissertation concern prosocial motivations in different social contexts, applying conceptual, experimental, and survey methodologies to investigate how the complex and diverse interaction between psychological attributes and the social environment shapes prosocial behaviors. The first essay provides a conceptual framework on how cognition links relevant stimuli with innate moralities to construct Public Service Motivation (PSM) and guild various social behaviors. The second essay builds on the first essay and provides empirical evidence for the essential role of innate moralities in shaping Public Service Motivation and affecting behavioral consequences. The third and fourth essay apply methods from experimental economics to investigate the role of contextual stimuli in affecting prosocial motivation in a lab experiment of the volunteer’s dilemma game. The third essay first extends the classic volunteer’s dilemma game and develops novel treatments to examine pro-social risk-taking and competitive behavior in a lab experiment. The fourth essay then incorporates the PSM theory in the extended volunteer’s dilemma game to explore the role of PSM in self-sacrifice behavior and its relationships with external contextual factors.