Abstract
<p>People's willingness to help others declines steeply with social distance: the more distant, different, or stigmatized those in need are, the less time, money, and consideration they receive — even when they need help the most. This article shows that moral learning from the consequences of past decisions can teach people to give more consideration to the welfare of outgroup members in future decisions and increase their outgroup prosociality. We developed a series of Socratic questions that guide people to systematically reflect on how their decision in a social dilemma affected distant others and how they reached it. Across four preregistered experiments (one reported in the Supplemental Materials), learning from a past decision through systematic moral reflection made participants more willing to donate their time and money to charities that help distant others, including real, incentive-compatible donations to charities helping a stigmatized group. Its effects transferred to outgroups the intervention never mentioned, persisted for more than one week, and exceeded those of two established prejudice-reduction interventions: empathy induction and perspective-taking. Process tracing methods and thematic analysis of the lessons participants learned indicated that these changes were mediated by participants learning to deliberate more and give greater consideration to how their actions affect distant others. These findings identify metacognitive learning as a promising pathway to expanding the reach of human generosity toward those who need it most.</p>