Desire for a positive moral self-regard exacerbates escalation of commitment to initiatives with prosocial aims

•We examine escalation of commitment to initiatives with prosocial and egoistic aims.•We manipulate the prosocial or egoistic aims of a task in the lab.•We find people escalate commitment more often to prosocial initiatives.•A desire for a positive moral self-regard mediates this difference.•Self-importance of moral identity moderates this difference.

Across three experiments, people escalated commitment more frequently to a failing prosocial initiative (i.e., an initiative that had the primary aim of improving the outcomes of others in need) than they did to a failing egoistic initiative (i.e., an initiative that had the primary aim of improving the outcomes of the decision-maker). A test of mediation (Study 1b) and a test of moderation (Study 2) each provided evidence that a desire for a positive moral self-regard underlies people’s tendency to escalate commitment more frequently to failing prosocial initiatives than to failing egoistic initiatives. We discuss the implications of these findings for the resource-allocation decisions that people and organizations face when undertaking initiatives with prosocial aims.