•Experiment on peer effects in pro- and anti-social behavior.•Anti-social behavior is more contagious than pro-social behavior.•Social proximity amplifies this effect.
This paper uses a novel ...experimental design to study the contagion of pro- and anti-social behavior and the role of social proximity among peers. Across systematic variations thereof, we find that anti-social behavior is generally more contagious than pro-social behavior. Surprisingly, we also find that social proximity amplifies the contagion of anti-social behavior more strongly than the contagion of pro-social behavior. Anti-social individuals are also most susceptible to the behavioral contagion of other anti-social peers. These findings paired with the methodological contribution inform the design of effective norm-based policy interventions directed at facilitating pro-social behavior and reducing anti-social behavior in social and economic environments.
Nudges are popular types of interventions. Recent years have seen the rise of ‘norm-nudges’—nudges whose mechanism of action relies on social norms, eliciting or changing social expectations. ...Norm-nudges can be powerful interventions, but they can easily fail to be effective and can even backfire unless they are designed with care. We highlight important considerations when designing norm-nudges and discuss a general model of social behavior based on social expectations and conditional preferences. We present the results of several experiments wherein norm-nudging can backfire, and ways to avoid those negative outcomes.
Corruption has fierce impacts on economic and societal development and is subject to a vast range of institutional, jurisdictional, societal, and economic conditions. It is this paper's aim to ...provide a reassessment and a comprehensive state‐of‐the‐art survey of existing literature on corruption and its causes and effects. A particularly strong focus is put on presenting and discussing insights resulting from empirical research and contrasting recent with older findings.
Scientists and policymakers seek to choose effective interventions that promote preventative health measures. We evaluated whether academics, behavioral science practitioners, and laypeople (N = ...1034) were able to forecast the effectiveness of seven different messages compared to a baseline message for Republicans and Democrats separately. These messages were designed to nudge mask-wearing attitudes, intentions, and behaviors. When examining predictions across political parties, forecasters predicted larger effects than those observed for Democrats compared to Republicans and made more accurate predictions for Republicans compared to Democrats. These results are partly driven by a lack of nudge effects on Democrats, as reported in Gelfand et al. (J Exp Soc Psychol, 2021). Academics and practitioners made more accurate predictions compared to laypeople. Although forecasters' predictions were correlated with the nudge interventions, all groups overestimated the observed results. We discuss potential reasons for why the forecasts did not perform better and how more accurate forecasts of behavioral intervention outcomes could potentially provide insight that can help save resources and increase the efficacy of interventions.
Exhibiting altruism toward and cooperativeness with others is a key ingredient for successful work relationships and managerial decision making. Rising political polarization creates a hazard because ...it ruptures this fabric and impedes the interaction of employees, especially across political isles. This paper’s focus is to examine various behavioral-, belief-, and norm-based layers of (non)strategic decision making that are plausibly affected by polarization. I quantify this phenomenon via five preregistered studies in the context of Donald J. Trump, comprising 15 well-powered behavioral experiments and a diverse set of over 8,600 participants. To capture the pervasiveness of polarization, I contrast the findings with various political and nonpolitical identities. Overall, I consistently document strong heterogeneous effects: ingroup-love occurs in the
perceptional
domain (how close one feels toward others), whereas outgroup-hate occurs in the
behavioral
domain (how one helps/harms/cooperates with others). The rich setting also enables me to examine the mechanisms of observed intergroup conflict, which can be attributed to one’s grim expectations regarding cooperativeness of the opposing faction, rather than one’s
actual
unwillingness to cooperate. For the first time, the paper also tests whether popular behavioral interventions (defaults and norm-nudges) can reduce the detrimental impact of polarization in the contexts studied here. The tested interventions improve prosociality but are ineffective in closing the polarization gap.
This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis.
Funding:
This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Grant EXC 2126/1– 390838866.
Supplemental Material:
Data and the online appendix are available at
https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4701
.
Authorities rely on reports from private citizens to detect and enforce more than a trivial portion of effective law-breaking. The present article is the first to study the cultural aspect of peer ...reporting experimentally. By collecting data in a post-Soviet country (Moldova), we focus in particular on how the Soviet legacy of using citizens as private informants may have a long-lasting effect on their willingness to cooperate with state authorities. We then contrast those effects with peer reporting behavior in France, a Western society. Our results suggest that participants in Moldova view cooperation with authorities as less socially acceptable than their counterparts in France. Our results also suggest that participants in Moldova engage less frequently in peer reporting than individuals in France. However, we also find that less peer reporting does not necessarily imply less tax compliance. Participants in both countries exhibit very similar tax compliance rates. We explain the effect of peer reporting on tax compliance in Moldova using the country's past experience during the Soviet era, when being reported to authorities was common and carried grave consequences.
Economic theory suggests that the deterrence of deviant behavior is driven by a combination of
severity
and
certainty
of punishment. This paper presents the first controlled experiment to study a ...third important factor that has been mainly overlooked: the
swiftness
of formal sanctions. We consider two dimensions: the timing at which the uncertainty about whether one will be punished is dissolved and the timing at which the punishment is actually imposed, as well as the combination thereof. By varying these dimensions of delay systematically, we find a surprising non-monotonic relation with deterrence: either no delay (immediate resolution and immediate punishment) or maximum delay (both resolution and punishment as much as possible delayed) emerge as most effective at deterring deviant behavior and recidivism. Our results yield implications for the design of institutional policies aimed at mitigating misconduct and reducing recidivism.
Research examining the effect of weak punishment on conformity indicates that punishment can backfire and lead to suboptimal social outcomes. We examine whether this effect is due to a lack of ...perceived legitimacy of rule enforcement, which would enable agents to justify selfish behavior. We address the question of legitimacy by shedding light upon the importance of social norms and their interplay with weak punishment in the context of a trust game. Across six conditions, we systematically vary the combination of the existence of weak punishment and norm information. Norm information may refer either to what most others do (empirical) or to what most others deem appropriate (normative). We show that in isolation, neither weak punishment nor empirical/normative information increase prosocial, reciprocal behavior. We instead find that reciprocity significantly increases when normative information and weak punishment are combined, but only when compliance is relatively cheap. When compliance is more costly, we find that the combination of punishment and generic empirical information about others’ conformity can have detrimental effects. In additional experiments, we show that this negative effect can be attributed to the punishment being perceived as unjustified, at least in some individuals. Our results have important implications for researchers and practitioners alike.
Across a pilot study and three preregistered experiments (N = 4128), we demonstrated that people knowingly shared conspiracy theories to advance social motives (e.g., to receive “likes”). In addition ...to accuracy, people seemed to value social engagement (e.g., “likes” and reactions). Importantly, people not only expected most conspiracy theories to generate greater social engagement than factual news, but they were also more willing to share conspiracy theories when they expected such theories, compared to factual news, to generate sufficiently greater levels of social engagement. In an interactive, multi-round, content-sharing paradigm, we found that people were very sensitive to the social feedback they received. When they received greater social feedback for sharing conspiracy theories than factual news, participants were significantly more likely to share conspiracy theories, even when they knew these theories to be false. Our findings advance our understanding of why and when individuals are likely to share conspiracy theories and identify important prescriptions for curbing the spread of conspiracy theories.
•People share conspiracy theories to generate social engagement.•Positive social feedback promotes the spread of conspiracy theories.•People readily share conspiracy theories that they know to be untrue.•In contrast to the theory of the Marketplace of Ideas, subtle forces can significantly and persistently promote the spread of conspiracy theories.
PDF
