  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 two pre-registered experiments (total N =
3,610), we investigated whether reputational incentives amplify sensitivity to
framing effects. Both experiments 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. We find
that framing effects are relatively insensitive to reputational incentives:
observability did not significantly amplify sensitivity to moral framing.
However, our results are not inconsistent with the possibility that
observability has some amplification effect; quantitatively, the observed
framing effect was 74% as large when decisions were private as when they were
observable. These results suggest that moral frames may tap into moral
preferences that are relatively deeply internalized, and that power of moral
frames to promote prosociality may not be strongly enhanced by making the
morally-framed behavior observable to others.
