The study addresses a long-standing puzzle in behavioural economics and psychology. Decades of research have established that people differ systematically in how much they weigh outcomes for themselves against outcomes for others, a dimension often described as social preferences. Yet people rarely face situations in which the consequences of their choices for others are perfectly transparent. Payoffs to interaction partners are frequently ambiguous, information is costly to acquire, and the causal chain between an action and its social footprint is murky. In those ambiguous spaces, the new findings indicate, both selfish and prosocial actors engage in a kind of motivated accounting, interpreting uncertain outcomes in ways that flatter their self-image.

The crucial asymmetry, however, lies in what happens next. When the researchers examined how these distortions travel between people, they found that distortions serving selfish motives catch on far more readily than distortions serving prosocial motives. In other words, if one person’s self-serving spin on an ambiguous social outcome makes selfish behaviour look acceptable, that interpretation can spread to observers and followers, who then adopt both the distorted belief and the selfish behaviour it licenses. Prosocial-serving distortions, by contrast, appear to be less contagious, meaning that the social dynamics of motivated reasoning are tilted in favour of selfishness.

This contagion effect has consequences that go beyond individual choices. If selfish-serving distortions propagate through groups, organisations, and markets, they can shift collective norms over time. A manager who convinces herself that a cost-saving measure probably will not harm employees, a trader who assumes that a risky product probably will not hurt clients, or a consumer who believes that a vaguely labelled product is probably ethical — each of these interpretations can be picked up, repeated, and amplified by others facing similar ambiguity. The result is a social environment in which self-serving beliefs about social impact become increasingly common, and in which followers become measurably more selfish as a consequence of adopting them.

The new work builds on a well-established experimental tradition. One of the foundational paradigms in this literature, introduced by Jason Dana and colleagues in 2007, demonstrated what the authors called exploiting moral wiggle room: when given the option to remain ignorant about how their choices affected a partner, many people chose ignorance and then behaved selfishly, revealing an illusory preference for fairness. People who claim to value equality will happily sacrifice it, provided they never have to see the inequality their choices create. The paradigm showed that information avoidance is not a passive failure but an active strategy for preserving a moral self-image while acting in one’s own interest.

Subsequent research has mapped the psychology of this strategy in detail. Eric Haisley and Robert Weber showed in 2010 that people interpret ambiguous payoff distributions in whatever way supports selfish choices, resolving uncertainty in the direction of their material interest. More recently, Rachel Carlson, Michal Maréchal, Bilal Oud, Ernst Fehr and Molly Crockett demonstrated motivated misremembering: after making selfish decisions, people recall those decisions as more generous than they actually were, with the memory distortion tracking the size of the selfish gain. Together, these findings sketch a mind that does not merely avoid inconvenient information but actively rewrites it — before, during, and after the decision.

What remained unclear until now was the social life of these distortions. Ignorance and spin are usually studied as individual phenomena, but people observe one another, imitate one another, and take cues from one another about what counts as acceptable behaviour. A 2026 study by Konstanze Reher, Maximilian Götz, Francesco Toscano and Julia Gross in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology showed that both the social acceptance of ignoring social consequences and the choice to do so depend on how widespread ignorance already is. If many people around you are choosing not to know, ignoring the consequences of your own actions becomes more socially permissible and more individually likely. Information avoidance, in other words, is itself subject to social contagion.

The Vollberg and Gross study extends this logic from the avoidance of information to the distortion of it. The distinction matters because distortion is arguably the more insidious mechanism. A person who avoids information can at least claim not to have known; a person who distorts available information constructs a belief that actively supports a preferred course of action and can be communicated to others as if it were an honest assessment. When such communicated distortions are selfish-serving, they give observers both a template for interpreting ambiguity and a licence for selfishness. The new findings indicate that this template travels: followers exposed to selfish-serving distortions not only adopt the beliefs but also become more selfish in their own decisions, whereas prosocial-serving distortions do not exert a comparable pull.

The theoretical implications reach into one of the liveliest debates in economics. A major 2025 review by Ernst Fehr and Gary Charness in the Journal of Economic Literature synthesised the evidence on social preferences, documenting how robustly people differ in the weight they place on others’ outcomes and how consequential those differences are for markets, organisations, and policy. The new study adds a dynamic dimension to that picture. Social preferences are not only heterogeneous across individuals; the beliefs through which those preferences are expressed are malleable, motivated, and socially transmitted. A population’s apparent generosity or selfishness may therefore depend not just on the distribution of underlying preferences but on which kinds of motivated beliefs happen to be circulating within it.

For anyone concerned with institutional design, the practical message is sobering. Environments rich in ambiguity about social consequences do not merely permit individual self-serving behaviour; they cultivate and disseminate it. Transparency requirements, impact reporting, and mechanisms that make the distributional consequences of choices hard to misread are often justified on the grounds that they inform decision makers. The new research suggests a second justification: by reducing the interpretive space in which self-serving spin can operate, such mechanisms may also slow the social spread of the beliefs that normalise selfishness. Conversely, settings in which impact remains perpetually ambiguous may allow selfish-serving distortions to compound, generation after generation of decisions, quietly shifting what groups regard as acceptable. The fair-trade shopper, the policy maker, and the manager are all, in this light, participating in a collective negotiation over the meaning of uncertain consequences — and the evidence suggests that the selfish side of that negotiation currently has the easier job of winning converts.

Subject of Research: Motivated distortion of beliefs about the social consequences of one's actions and its contagious spread in social decision making

Article Title: Both selfish and prosocial actors distort their impact on others, but selfish-serving spin seems to spread

Article References: Both selfish and prosocial actors distort their impact on others, but selfish-serving spin seems to spread. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02584-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02584-4

Keywords: social preferences, decision making, behavioural economics, moral wiggle room, information avoidance, motivated reasoning, self-serving bias, prosociality, social contagion, human behaviour, ambiguity, cooperation

The research, conducted by Marius C. Vollberg of the University of Zurich and University of Geneva and Jörg Gross of the University of Zurich, spans nine preregistered online experiments involving 8,769 adults, predominantly residents of the United States. The central finding is striking in its symmetry: both selfish and prosocial individuals distort the social consequences of their choices, but they do so in predictably different directions. Selfish people shrink the apparent harm of their actions, while prosocial people inflate the apparent benefit of theirs. Crucially, when these distorted interpretations are transmitted to others, only the selfish-serving version reliably spreads, nudging those who encounter it toward more selfish behaviour.

The experimental logic was elegantly simple. Participants, cast as ‘Deciders’, chose between two options with fully known personal payoffs: option A yielded 7 points for themselves, option B yielded 5. Each option also carried an ambiguous consequence for another anonymous participant, the ‘Receiver’. Option A gave the Receiver between 1 and 3 points, option B between 3 and 5. Because the Decider’s own payoff was certain while the Receiver’s was a range, the design captured a fundamental asymmetry in social life: personal outcomes are immediate and tangible, whereas social outcomes are shadowy and hard to verify. After choosing, participants estimated the Receiver’s actual outcome for both options, with real money riding on the accuracy of their guesses.

If participants treated each outcome within a range as equally likely, their estimates should cluster around the midpoint and should not depend on what they chose. That is not what happened. Selfish Deciders, those who took the higher payoff, reported the two options’ social consequences as more similar than prosocial Deciders did, effectively portraying their choice as socially harmless. Statistically, the difference was robust: prosocial Deciders’ estimates exceeded selfish Deciders’ by a coefficient of 0.24, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.14 to 0.34. Selfish Deciders exaggerated the Receiver’s outcome under the selfish option while downplaying it under the prosocial option, compressing the apparent moral gap between the two choices until their selfishness looked costless.

Prosocial Deciders distorted too, but differently. They exaggerated the social benefit of the option they chose, and, intriguingly, they also exaggerated the benefit of the selfish option they rejected. Rather than painting their sacrifice as heroic against a dark alternative, they construed a world in which even a modest social benefit justified forgoing personal gain, casting themselves as people who need little prompting to do good. In a neutral condition where the self-maximizing option also maximized the Receiver’s payoff, removing any conflict between self-interest and social interest, estimates drifted closer to the true midpoints, though some downplaying of the unchosen alternative persisted.

Sceptics might wonder whether these deviations reflect genuine beliefs about how the ambiguous outcomes were generated rather than motivated distortions. The team addressed this in a conceptual replication that made the outcome-generation process fully transparent: participants watched an animation showing numbers being sampled into an urn and one drawn at random, making clear that the expected value equalled the range midpoint and that their choice could not influence the process. Distortions persisted. The selfish pattern replicated in full, and the overall difference between Decider types remained strong, indicating that the effects cannot be dismissed as private theories about hidden sampling procedures.

Two further experiments probed the psychology behind the distortions. When participants reported their estimates before choosing, the distortions were already present, though attenuated, ruling out a purely post-hoc justification account. More decisive was a forced-choice design in which participants were randomly assigned to implement either the selfish or the prosocial option. If distortions served to justify specific actions, forcing a choice should have reshaped them accordingly. Instead, distortions tracked participants’ underlying social preferences, measured under free choice, better than the choice they had been forced to make; a Bayesian model comparison strongly favoured the preference-based account. Distortions, in other words, are not excuses manufactured after the fact but preference-consistent interpretations of social reality.

Yet the distortions also revealed a telling double standard. In a separate task, participants faced the very same ambiguous ranges, but this time the outcomes determined their own bonuses. Their earlier estimates about others’ outcomes did not predict how they treated equivalent ambiguity when their own money was at stake. People who had reported that a 3-to-5 range favoured the Receiver did not behave as if they believed it when choosing gambles for themselves. This suggests the distortions are not sincere beliefs about underlying distributions but selective interpretations reserved for the social domain, beliefs held too weakly to guide decisions where self-interest is directly measurable.

Do these distortions actually pay off socially? A fifth experiment asked naive observers to rate the trustworthiness of Deciders whose choices were presented with fully known social outcomes drawn from the distortion patterns observed earlier. Selfish Deciders whose outcomes implied both options were socially equivalent, the aggregate selfish distortion, were rated significantly more trustworthy than selfish Deciders in any other scenario, including the undistorted midpoint case. Prosocial Deciders likewise earned higher trust ratings when outcomes matched their aggregate distortion, implying a generous sacrifice. Distortion, when it goes undetected, appears to buy reputation, offering a concrete social function for what might otherwise look like mere self-deception.

The most consequential finding came last. In a final experiment, participants saw estimates attributed to a previous participant, an ‘Influencer’, before making their own choices and estimates. When the Influencer’s estimates were selfish-serving, portraying the selfish option as no more harmful than the prosocial one, Followers adopted those estimates and became significantly more likely to choose selfishly themselves, an effect that held against every comparison condition. Prosocial-serving distortions, though sometimes echoed in individual estimates, produced no reliable shift in average estimates or choices. Because fewer than 10 percent of Deciders actually produce the selfish aggregate pattern, a small minority may exert a disproportionate influence on collective beliefs. The authors suggest that information lowering the psychological cost of selfishness appeals to undecided actors in a way that glorified sacrifice does not. In domains from climate mitigation to foreign aid, the study offers a psychological foundation for why polarized views about the impact, rather than merely the value, of our actions take hold: when social consequences are open to interpretation, people may predictably form divergent interpretations, and the most self-serving of them can spread.

Subject of Research: How selfish and prosocial individuals distort estimates of the ambiguous social consequences of their decisions, and how those distortions spread socially

Article Title: Selfish and prosocial individuals both distort their actions’ impact, but selfish distortions can be more contagious

Article References: Vollberg, M. C., & Gross, J. (2026). Selfish and prosocial individuals both distort their actions’ impact, but selfish distortions can be more contagious. Nature Human Behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02585-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02585-3

Keywords: social preferences, decision making, motivated reasoning, selfishness, prosocial behaviour, ambiguity, trustworthiness, social contagion, behavioral economics, moral psychology, Nature Human Behaviour, preregistered experiments

In an exploratory study published in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, Sára Laníková and Vojtěch Zíka of Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, Czechia, set out to test whether inequality aversion is associated with pro-environmental attitudes. Their starting point is conceptually elegant. Environmental protection is, in many ways, a distributional problem. Climate change hits the poorest hardest while being driven disproportionately by the wealthiest, and environmental policies such as carbon taxes raise well-documented questions about who pays and who benefits. If concern about unfair distributions of outcomes is a stable feature of a person’s social preferences, it is plausible that the same disposition colors how that person thinks about the unequal burdens and benefits of environmental degradation.

The researchers distinguish between two faces of inequality aversion, following the influential framework developed by economists Ernst Fehr and Klaus Schmidt in 1999. Advantageous inequality aversion describes discomfort when one is better off than others, the guilt of the favored party in an unequal split. Disadvantageous inequality aversion describes discomfort when one is worse off, the resentment of the disfavored party, sometimes described as envy. These two dispositions are related but distinct, and the study treats them separately rather than collapsing them into a single fairness score. The distinction matters because the two forms can pull behavior in different directions and because prior work suggests they may have different cognitive and emotional underpinnings.

To measure environmental attitudes, the team used the New Ecological Paradigm scale, or NEP, the most widely deployed instrument in the field. First introduced by Riley Dunlap and Kent Van Liere in 1978 and revised in 2000, the NEP assesses endorsement of a worldview in which humans are embedded in, and dependent upon, the natural environment, rather than standing above it. Higher NEP scores indicate stronger pro-environmental attitudes. Inequality aversion, by contrast, was measured through self-reported survey items capturing how much respondents dislike being ahead of others or behind them in distributive situations. The data were collected in December 2024 from participants in a decision-making study conducted in the Czech Republic, with informed consent obtained from all participants and the data stored and published anonymously. The datasets and the R scripts used for the analyses are publicly available in an Open Science Framework repository, an transparency measure that allows independent researchers to re-run every statistical model.

The headline result is a positive bivariate association between NEP scores and advantageous inequality aversion. In plain terms, people who reported greater discomfort with being better off than others also tended to hold stronger pro-environmental attitudes. This is the form of inequality aversion that most closely parallels altruism, since both involve a willingness to give up personal advantage for the sake of others, so the finding fits neatly within the existing literature linking other-regarding preferences to environmental concern. Intriguingly, however, no significant association emerged between NEP scores and disadvantageous inequality aversion. Disliking being worse off than others, the envy-like component, did not track environmental attitudes in this sample. The two forms of inequality aversion were, as expected, positively correlated with each other, confirming that they capture related but separable dispositions.

The story becomes more complicated when the researchers move from simple correlations to regression analyses. Once political orientation and sociodemographic characteristics were included as controls, the association between advantageous inequality aversion and NEP scores lost statistical significance. This pattern carries an important interpretive warning. The apparent link between fairness preferences and environmental attitudes may not be a direct causal or psychological connection at all; it could instead reflect an underlying confound. Political orientation is the most obvious candidate, since both environmental concern and redistributive preferences are strongly structured along the left-right political spectrum in many countries. People on the political left tend to score higher on both, which can generate a positive correlation between the two even if neither causes the other. The study’s design cannot adjudicate between these possibilities, and the authors are explicit that the findings are exploratory and warrant further investigation with more robust designs.

One demographic result did survive the regression controls: a gender difference. Women scored significantly higher than men on the NEP scale and also reported greater advantageous inequality aversion. This echoes a long line of research on gender and environmentalism. A meta-analytic tradition stretching back to work by Elizabeth Zelezny and colleagues in 2000 has repeatedly found women expressing stronger environmental attitudes and, often, more pro-environmental behavior, a difference that has been attributed to socialization, gender roles, and value orientations emphasizing care and self-transcendence. The parallel gender gap in advantageous inequality aversion suggests that the two dispositions may share common developmental or social roots, though the study does not test mechanisms. The authors also report a methodological caveat: the internal consistency of their inequality aversion measure differed by gender, with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.66 for women and 0.78 for men, a statistically significant difference detected using Feldt’s test, which the authors flag as a limitation noted in prior methodological work.

Why does this matter beyond the laboratory? The answer lies in the economics of environmental policy. Policies that aim to protect the environment almost always redistribute something, whether it is the cost of a carbon tax, the allocation of emission permits, or the siting of infrastructure. Research has shown that inequality aversion predicts support for public and private redistribution in general, and that public acceptance of environmental instruments such as CO2 taxes depends heavily on perceptions of fairness in how burdens are shared. If the same people who object to unequal outcomes are also the people most receptive to environmental messages, then framing environmental policy in distributive terms, emphasizing who bears the costs and who reaps the benefits, could be a powerful lever for building coalitions. Conversely, if the association is largely an artifact of political orientation, then fairness framings may simply activate existing political identities rather than persuading anyone new. Distinguishing between these scenarios is precisely the kind of question the Czech team’s exploratory results set up for future, better-powered studies.

The study also fills a genuine gap in the literature. A comprehensive interdisciplinary review by Niklas Heinz and Astrid Kausel-Köhler published in Ecological Economics in 2021 catalogued experimental studies of other-regarding preferences and pro-environmental behavior and found altruism dominating the field, with inequality aversion rarely operationalized at all. Recent work has begun to change that. A 2021 study by Liam Delaney and colleagues examined whether economic preferences broadly predict pro-environmental behavior, and a 2021 analysis by Andreas Ziegler explicitly brought the NEP scale into contact with behavioral economics measures of social and economic preferences. The new study extends this line by isolating the two directional components of inequality aversion and testing them separately against environmental attitudes, a granularity that earlier work lacked. Related research on informal recycling in Vietnam, charitable contributions for conservation among the rural poor, and social preferences for the distributive outcomes of climate policy all point in the same direction: distributional concerns and environmental outcomes are intertwined in ways that single-preference models miss.

The authors are careful about what their data can and cannot show. The association between advantageous inequality aversion and environmental attitudes is positive but modest, and it does not survive controls for political orientation and sociodemographics. The sample is drawn from a single country, the measures are self-reported, and attitudes are not behavior, a gap that environmental psychology has documented extensively, including in prior work by Zíka and colleagues showing that the attitude-behavior gap runs in both directions. Still, the exploratory findings open a promising avenue. If future studies with experimental measures of inequality aversion, such as distribution games, and longitudinal or cross-national designs confirm a robust link, the implications would ripple through environmental communication, policy design, and our basic understanding of why some people embrace environmental values while others remain indifferent. For now, the study’s contribution is to have asked a question the field had largely overlooked, and to have shown that the answer, like the environment itself, is tangled up with fairness.

Subject of Research: The relationship between inequality aversion and pro-environmental attitudes

Article Title: Social preferences and the environment: exploring the relationship between inequality aversion and environmental attitudes

Article References: Laníková, S., & Zíka, V. (2026). Social preferences and the environment: exploring the relationship between inequality aversion and environmental attitudes. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-026-01143-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13412-026-01143-7

Keywords: environmental attitudes, inequality aversion, social preferences, NEP scale, altruism, environmental psychology, fairness, gender differences, political orientation, behavioral economics, pro-environmental behavior, distributional preferences