ABSTRACT
Prosocial behaviors are behaviors that benefit others at some cost to the self. Various motivations and factors influence it. Here, we focused on the effects of two types of donors’ mindsets on such behaviors: Fixed (vs. growth) mindsets, which refers to people’s beliefs about the stability (vs. malleability) of human traits, and a scarcity mindset, which refers to people’s perceived gap between their requirement for resources and resources availability.
We expected the effect of fixed versus growth mindsets on people’s monetary giving
to be moderated by their scarcity mindset. Specifically, we expected that under scarcity
mindset, growth mindset individuals would engage in more donation giving than fixed
mindset individuals, but expected no differences in donation giving between growth
mindset and fixed mindset individuals when scarcity is not salient.

We examined this hypothesis in a series of six studies. Despite initial evidence for an interactive effect, we did not find support for our hypothesis.