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Does giving behavior in economic games reflect true prosocial preferences or is it due to confusion? Research showing that trait Honesty-Humility accounts for giving behavior suggests the former, whereas research showing that participants give money to a computer might suggest the latter. In three preregistered, well-powered studies, we examined the relation of Honesty-Humility with behavior in the Dictator Game (Study 1, N = 468) and Public Goods Game (Studies 2 and 3, each N = 313), while participants interacted either with humans (“social game”) or with a computer (“non-social game”). We found that (a) decisions in the non-social game predicted decisions in the social game, supporting the confusion hypothesis; (b) the effect of Honesty-Humility differed within and between games; and (b) participants who gave money to the computer reported acting as if they were playing with humans. Overall, the studies suggest that both prosocial preferences and confusion underlie giving behavior.

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Building on the Computers Are Social Actors framework, we provide an overview of research demonstrating that humans behave prosocially towards machines. In doing so, we outline that similar motivational and cognitive processes play a role when people act in prosocial ways towards humans and machines. These include perceiving the machine as somewhat human, applying social categories to the machine, being socially influenced by the machine, and experiencing social emotions towards the machine. We conclude that studying prosocial behavior towards machines is important to facilitate proper functioning of human-machine interactions. We further argue that machines provide an interesting yet under-utilized resource in the study of prosocial behavior, because they are both highly controllable and humanlike.