The Andrew Carnegie Effect: Legacy Motives Increase the Intergenerational Allocation of Wealth to Collective Causes

Abstract

Andrew Carnegie was known for proclaiming that people have an obligation to leave their wealth to collective causes that benefit society. Yet, people tend to think of legacy within the constraints of their familial circles. In our work, we show that a simple reflection task that activates legacy motives can lead people to overcome this restricted way of construing legacy, expanding their circle of moral concern when considering how to allocate their wealth between different types of beneficiaries. Across four preregistered studies ( N = 3,656), we found that when people are prompted to consider how their lives will impact future generations, they allocate more of their wealth to collectivistic beneficiaries (e.g., charities) and less of their wealth to relational beneficiaries (e.g., family members). We call this the “Andrew Carnegie Effect.”