Moral foundations and decisions to donate bonus to charity: Data from paid online participants in the United States

We present novel data linking other-regarding behavior outside of a laboratory with a participant's moral foundations, demographics, and opinions/awareness of social problems. These data were originally collected for Study 2 of O'Grady et al. (2019). Anonymous, paid participants were recruited through the online labor market Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Mturk workers located in the United States and meeting MTurk's “Masters Qualification” were offered $0.50 to complete a short survey. We used the moral foundations questionnaire (MFQ) developed by Graham et al. (2009) to classify participants based on their moral intuitions. After participants completed the MFQ and six diversion questions about their opinions and awareness of current social problems, we measured other-regarding behavior through an incentivized experiment. Respondents were awarded a $1 bonus and the option to donate any part of their bonus to a charity with the promise of a matching donation made by the researchers. Participants could only donate to one of three predefined charities and charity options were randomly assigned to respondents within three separate data collection waves. In addition, the dataset contains detailed information regarding situational details of the survey task including survey date, time of day, duration between worker request and recruitment, survey completion time, and performance on attention checks.