Rewarding More Is Better for Soliciting Help, Yet More So for Cash Than for Goods: Revisiting and Reframing the Tale of Two Markets With Replications and Extensions of Heyman and Ariely (2004)

Abstract

Heyman and Ariely (2004) demonstrated that the expected effectiveness of soliciting help varied depending on the “market”, a money market represented by cash rewards versus a social market represented by goods as rewards. They showed that, as cash rewards increase, individuals expected others to be more willing to help, yet, when offering social goods as rewards such as candy, expected willingness to help was insensitive to rewards’ monetary worth. We conducted two pre-registered replication studies (total: N = 3302, MTurk/Prolific) of Study 1 in Heyman and Ariely (2004) and found support for one of their main claims that people are more sensitive to worth when the reward is cash than goods. However, the rewards’ monetary worth impacted expected willingness to help even in social markets, deviating from the original findings. Extensions further compared between-subject and within-subject designs, examined perceived affect (joy and regret), and added a new control condition. We concluded that higher compensation is generally perceived as better when soliciting help, yet more so for the money market cash rewards than for the social market goods rewards. All materials, data, and code are provided on https://osf.io/y9p7u/