Social norms have long been recognized as an important factor in curtailing antisocial behavior, and stricter prosocial norms are commonly associated with increased prosocial behavior. In this study, we provide evidence that very strict prosocial norms can have a perverse negative relationship with prosocial behavior. In laboratory experiments conducted in 10 countries across 5 continents, we measured the level of honest behavior and elicited injunctive norms of honesty. We find that individuals who hold very strict norms (i.e., those who perceive a small lie to be as socially unacceptable as a large lie) are more likely to lie to the maximal extent possible. This finding is consistent with a simple behavioral rationale. If the perceived norm does not differentiate between the severity of a lie, lying to the full extent is optimal for a norm violator since it maximizes the financial gain, while the perceived costs of the norm violation are unchanged. We show that the relation between very strict prosocial norms and high levels of rule violations generalizes to civic norms related to common moral dilemmas, such as tax evasion, cheating on government benefits, and fare dodging on public transportation. Those with very strict attitudes toward civic norms are more likely to lie to the maximal extent possible. A similar relation holds across countries. Countries with a larger fraction of people with very strict attitudes toward civic norms have a higher society-level prevalence of rule violations.

This paper reports data from three subject pools (n = 717 subjects) using techniques based on those of Loewenstein et al. (J Personal Soc Psychol 57:426–441, 1989) and Blanco et al. (Games Econ Behav 72:321–338, 2011) to obtain parameters, respectively, of stated and revealed inequality aversion. We provide a replication opportunity for those papers, with two innovations: (1) a design which allows stated and revealed preferences to be compared at the individual level; (2) assessment of robustness of findings across subjects from a UK university, a Turkish university and Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our findings on stated aversion to inequality are qualitatively similar to those of Loewenstein et al. in each of our subject pools, whereas there are notable differences between some of our findings on revealed preference and those of Blanco et al. We find that revealed advantageous inequality aversion is often stronger than revealed dis-advantageous inequality aversion. In most subject pools, we find some (weak) correlation between corresponding parameters of stated and revealed inequality aversion.

The Inclusion of Other in the Self (IOS) scale is a popular tool to measure interpersonal closeness that is increasingly being used in economics. We propose a new implementation of the IOS scale that, contrary to existing implementations, meets its theoretical requirements. We also develop and validate a continuous version of the IOS scale. This Continuous IOS scale gives a more precise measure and solves a no-overlap avoidance bias present in the standard IOS scale. Our IOS scales are easy-to-use, well-documented, and available on GitHub at https://github.com/geoffreycastillo/ios-js .

Working Paper

Social psychologists have long argued that persistently high rates of violence or anti-social behavior in the US South can be attributed to a so-called ‘culture of honor’. This culture requires an individual to stand up for himself using violence if necessary to protect his reputation. Within a social dilemma, these cultural differences in response to the cooperation and punishment behavior of others might lead to differences in social outcomes. In experiments using an innovative online platform, we find differences between Southerners and their counterparts with respect to the directionality of punishment in a social dilemma. These differences parallel the variation in effectiveness of punishment as a means of enhancing cooperation as well as the levels of anti-social punishment across societies.

Working Paper

Does Inequality Aversion explain Free Riding and Conditional Cooperation?

with Robin Cubitt and Simon Gächter

Standard theory predicts under provision of public goods as the benefits of these goods are non-rivalrous and non-excludable while the individual contributions to their provision are costly. In spite of this theoretical prediction we observe greater contributions than expected in both real-world situations as well as in laboratory experiments. Many possible behavioral motivations have been offered to explain these patterns of behavior. In this study our primary aim is to see if inequality aversion can explain these patterns of conditional cooperation and free riding. We find that, for the most part, inequality aversion explains perfect conditional cooperation as predicted by the Fehr and Schmidt (1999) model. In contrast, we find that subjects classified as free riders are equally likely to have low beta (as predicted by the Fehr and Schmidt (1999) model) as they are to have high beta (contrary to prediction). Further, the majority of our subjects are classified as imperfect conditional cooperators or other types; that is, the majority of our subjects are classified as types not at all predicted by the Fehr and Schmidt (1999) model.

Working Paper

The Behavioral Mechanisms of Voluntary Cooperation in WEIRD and Non-WEIRD Societies

with Till Olaf Weber, Simon Gächter, Fatima Lambarraa, and Jonathan Schulz

Submitted January 2021

 

An overwhelming amount of behavioral economics research on voluntary cooperation in social dilemmas has been conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. One emerging pattern is that people are conditional cooperators, with fairly optimistic beliefs about others’ cooperativeness and some willingness to punish free riders. Do these results generalize to societies that are culturally distant from WEIRD societies? We use one-shot experiments to study the behavioral mechanisms of voluntary cooperation, which requires separating preferences for conditional cooperation from beliefs about others’ cooperation, and to study expected and actual punishment, as well as underlying emotions. We ran our experiments in two classically WEIRD societies, the UK and the US, and two societies that are culturally very distant from the UK and the US, but close to each other: Morocco and Turkey. We find that cooperation levels are higher in the US and UK than in Morocco and Turkey. This result is driven more by differences in beliefs than in conditionally cooperative dispositions, which are similar in the four subject pools. Peer punishment is low and, like the emotions that underpin it, remarkably similar across societies. Our results highlight the central role of beliefs in explaining differences in voluntary cooperation within and across societies.

Work in Progress

Measuring the Importance of Social Distances

with Geoffrey Castillo

We present a method to study social distances in a controlled environment and look at their impact on behavior. In an online experiment we pair members of the general US population with varying degrees of social distance. We measure social distances using a revealed preference method: we ask participants to make a series of binary choices; in each of them participants choose to which of 2 people we send money. We find that participants care strongly about social distances. We also estimate a structural model of social discounting, which says that people discount payoffs received by others as a function of the social distance.

Work in Progress

Our research explores how individuals remember their performance on previous assessments and whether they systematically overestimate their prior performance. This contrasts to standard economic theory where individuals are assumed to remember correctly or have random errors instead of systematic ones. Following the recent foundational work of Zimmerman 2020 and Chew, Huang, and Zhao 2020 who find students tend to believe they answered questions correctly that they actually missed or never saw, we believe students will overestimate their performance. The literature refers to this phenomenon as motivated memory or motivated belief. The primary objective of our work is to understand how gender and test design interact with false memory, especially topics where stereotypes persist.

Motivated Belief and Gender

with Timothy Flannery and Siyu Wang

Although experimental and clinical evidence suggest that endogenous sex hormones influence bone sarcoma genesis, the hypothesis has not been adequately tested in an appropriate animal model. We conducted a historical cohort study of Rottweiler dogs because they frequently undergo elective gonadectomy and spontaneously develop appendicular bone sarcomas, which mimic the biological behavior of the osteosarcomas that affect children and adolescents. Data were collected by questionnaire from owners of 683 Rottweiler dogs living in North America. To determine whether there was an association between endogenous sex hormones and risk of bone sarcoma, relative risk (RR) of incidence rates and hazard ratios for bone sarcoma were calculated for dogs subdivided on the basis of lifetime gonadal hormone exposure. Bone sarcoma was diagnosed in 12.6% of dogs in this cohort during 71,004 dog-months follow-up. Risk for bone sarcoma was significantly influenced by age at gonadectomy. Male and female dogs that underwent gonadectomy before 1 year of age had an approximate one in four lifetime risk for bone sarcoma and were significantly more likely to develop bone sarcoma than dogs that were sexually intact [RR ±95% CI = 3.8 (1.5–9.2) for males; RR ±95% CI = 3.1 (1.1–8.3) for females]. χ2 test for trend showed a highly significant inverse dose-response relationship between duration of lifetime gonadal exposure and incidence rate of bone sarcoma (P = 0.008 for males, P = 0.006 for females). This association was independent of adult height or body weight. We conclude that the subset of Rottweiler dogs that undergo early gonadectomy represent a unique, highly accessible target population to further study the gene:environment interactions that determine bone sarcoma risk and to test whether interventions can inhibit the spontaneous development of bone sarcoma.