This dissertation explores topics related to behaviors that can be motivated by either self-interest or altruism. Chapter 1 investigates the strategies that laypeople use when attempting to persuade people to engage in behaviors that benefit both the self and others. When choosing between an egoistic message, an altruistic message, and messages combining both appeal types, people consistently choose to send the combined message when aiming to persuade others. We find evidence for a psychological mechanism that aligns with work on perspective-taking as egocentric anchoring and adjustment. Persuaders demonstrate egocentric anchoring, assuming that others will be convinced by the messages they themselves find convincing. They also adjust from egocentrism in systematic ways. Message senders demonstrate a “broad reach averaging” pattern, sending both egoistic and altruistic reasons in order to reach a wider range of people. Participants’ estimates about the distribution of perspectives across the population incorporate the norm of self-interest, the expectation that more people will be driven by altruistic motives than self-interested ones. We also look at the accuracy of people’s predictions about message efficacy and find that people’s expectations about which messages will be most convincing largely do not match the behavioral intentions of message recipients. We contribute to an understanding of the strategies that people without professional persuasive training use when trying to shift the behaviors of those around them. Chapter 2 focuses on the ways in which an advocate’s word-deed alignment and misalignment impact people’s intentions to adopt the behaviors an advocate is promoting. We explore this in the case of behaviors that have not yet gained widespread acceptance. We replicate previous work in this domain finding that people are less likely to engage in the behavior being promoted after seeing an advocate for that behavior act inconsistently, either by not having solar panels installed on their own home while promoting them or by being seen eating a cheeseburger after encouraging vegetarianism. While prior work focused on the way this effect could be driven by second-order beliefs, people’s beliefs about the ambassador’s beliefs, we find that the extent to which people dislike the ambassador is a better predictor of people’s behavioral intentions. Even when including a scenario where people imagine overhearing a private conversation where the ambassador states their true beliefs, participants continue to dislike the ambassador who behaves inconsistently and report lower behavioral intentions after witnessing inconsistent behavior. The studies in this chapter offer a more nuanced perspective on the psychological mechanisms determining people’s behavioral intentions in response to word-deed misalignment, highlighting that people are more likely to have a direct negative reaction to inconsistency than they are to make careful inferences about beliefs from behavior.