Increasing the size of a donation can actually make people view the giver as less generous.
Social observers use Bayesian reasoning to judge a person's character based on their perceived wealth. If a high donation suggests the giver is extremely rich, people assume the gift represents a smaller sacrifice of their total resources. This paradox means that a smaller gift from a middle-class person is seen as more generous than a larger gift from a millionaire. It reveals a glitch in social perception where the absolute value of an action is ignored in favor of proportional effort. For the public, this means that flashy displays of wealth often backfire when trying to build a reputation for kindness.
When giving more makes you look worse: paradoxical inferences in a Bayesian model of social evaluation
PsyArXiv · 82p6f_v1
People readily infer how much another agent cares about their welfare, for example after observing this agent give them some of what they have. However, these inferences become more difficult when there is uncertainty over the resources someone has to share, a common real-world scenario. We develop a Bayesian com- putational model of how people infer the welfare trade-off ratio (WTR) of another agent under resource uncertainty. This model predicts that under uncertainty people should average ove