Do-gooder derogation

Do-gooder derogation is a phenomenon where a person's morally motivated behavior leads to them being perceived negatively by others.

These include public goods games, experiments designed to measure altruism and generosity, and the analysis of preexisting data.

[7] Research suggests that since people are highly sensitive to any criticism or challenge to their morals, they are more likely to put down the source of this 'threat'.

[13] In addition, real-world data from an online fundraising website found that not only were the lowest donations anonymized, but so were the highest.

This might be because the top donators have set the bar at an undesirably high level and "make the contributions of others look less impressive by comparison.

The authors suggest that social comparison may lead children to feel less positively towards peers who demonstrate greater generosity than themselves, while this effect doesn't appear to occur when comparing themselves to more generous adults.