New research has uncovered that people tend to view charitable actions as less morally acceptable than doing nothing charitable at all if the purportedly altruistic act is “tainted” by self-interested motives.

“The experiments reported here demonstrate the existence of a novel psychological phenomenon: the tainted-altruism effect,” George E. Newman and Daylian M. Cain wrote in their study, which was published in Psychological Science.

Across four experiments that included over 600 participants, the researchers found that people viewed individuals who were charitable for self-interested reasons as less moral than individuals who were selfish but produced no charitable benefit. The participants only viewed purely selfish individuals as less moral than self-interested charitable individuals when the two were explicitly compared to one another.

People evaluated a man who worked at a homeless shelter to impress a woman as less moral than a man who worked at a coffee shop to impress a woman. The participants were also less likely to say they’d hire a for-profit promoter for a hypothetical fundraising event that charged 5 percent of the amount generated for the charity — even if the for-profit promoter would raise substantially more money for the charity than an alternative promoter. But they had no problem hiring the for-profit promoter for a hypothetical corporate event.

“There seems to be an important psychological distinction between charity and profitability; hence, there are many reasons to think that people may criticize charitable efforts that also provide personal gains. However, it is unclear why such efforts may be perceived as worse than doing no good at all,” the researchers wrote.

One the key reasons for this tainted-altruism effect is the belief that a person acting charitable for self-interested reasons could be acting even more charitably if it were not for their self-interested motives. In purely selfish cases, however, people don’t consider that a person could have even acted charitably.

“When someone is charitable for self-interested reasons, people consider whether the agent might have engaged in the same charitable behavior without serving self-interest, ultimately concluding that the person did not behave as altruistically as he or she could have,” Newman and Cain explained. “However, when someone is purely selfish, people do not spontaneously consider whether the person could have been more altruistic.”

The researchers found that people evaluated a business that increased its reputation through charity donations as less moral than a business that increased its reputation through advertising. But being presented with counterfactual information appeared to eliminate the tainted-altruism effect. When the participants were informed that a business increased its reputation through advertising when it could have increased its reputation just as much by donating to charity, they viewed the business as less moral than a business that increased its reputation through charity donations.

“The present experiments identify important conditions surrounding the evaluation of charitable behavior and suggest that in some cases, public assessments of charitable actions as genuine may trump any actual benefits realized from those efforts,” the researchers concluded.