Francesca Gino and Sreedhari Desai recently posted their paper,
“Memory Lane and Morality: How Childhood Memories Promote
Prosocial Behavior” on SSRN. Here’s the abstract. * * * Four
experiments demonstrated that recalling memories from one’s own
childhood lead people to experience feelings of moral purity and
to behave prosocially. In Experiment 1, participants instructed
to recall memories from their childhood were more likely to help
the experimenter with a supplementary task than were
participants in a control condition, and this effect was
mediated by self-reported feelings of moral purity. In
Experiment 2, the same manipulation increased the amount of
money participants donated to a good cause, and self-reported
feelings of moral purity mediated this relationship. In
Experiment 3, participants who recalled childhood memories
judged the ethically-questionable behavior of others more
harshly, suggesting that childhood memories lead to altruistic
punishment. Finally, in Experiment 4, compared to a control