Experimental Essays on Morality and Perception

This PhD thesis is a collection of three independent essays employing experimental methods to investigate the links between moral behaviour and perception. Chapter 1 explores the role of image concerns in promise keeping. In our baseline treatments, we use double dictator games which embed and vary opportunities for subjects to hide their selfishness through self- and other-deception. Adding opportunities for promise exchange, our data is consistent with social-image concerns as one motivator of promise keeping. We find no evidence of subjects engaging in self-deception to evade their promise-induced commitments. Chapter 2 explores motivated reasoning in a context where third-party bystanders can prevent future norm transgressions. For this purpose, we introduce the Third-Party Protection Game. In this game, a third-party player can invest own resources to protect a passive player’s endowment from being appropriated by a dictator. The game features uncertainty regarding the degree of protection needed. We hypothesise that third-parties will report conveniently biased, i.e., less cynical beliefs about dictators the costlier it is to protect. Our data only provides moderate support. What we do find however is that third-parties more generally and irrespective of the assigned cost overestimate dictator generosity. Chapter 3 introduces the Costless Sharing Game (CSG). In this game, a sharer first earns a resource by completing a task and is then offered the opportunity to share the resource at no personal cost with a recipient. We use the CSG to consider how sharing depends on moral reasoning based on entitlement and desert (“intrinsic moral motivation”) and on whether the context of the sharer’s decision is known by the recipient (“extrinsic social motivation”). We observe very little reluctance to share. Interestingly, we also find mild evidence of a treatment interaction which suggests less sharing when neither intrinsic moral nor extrinsic social arguments for sharing are present

Taking the New Year’s Resolution Test seriously: Eliciting individuals’ judgements about self-control and spontaneity

Self-control failure occurs when an individual experiences a conflict between immediate desires and longer-term goals, recognises psychological forces that hinder goal-directed action, tries to resist them but fails in the attempt. Behavioural economists often invoke assumptions about self-control failure to justify proposals for policy interventions. These arguments require workable methods for eliciting individuals’ goals and for verifying occurrences of self-control failure, but developing such methods confronts two problems. First, it is not clear that individuals’ goals are context-independent. Second, facing an actual conflict between a desire and a self-acknowledged goal, a person may consciously choose not to resist the desire, thinking that spontaneity is more important than self-control. We address these issues through an online survey that elicited individuals’ self-reported judgements about the relative importance of self-control and spontaneity in conflicts between enjoyment and health-related goals. To test for context-sensitivity, the judgement-elicitation questions were preceded by a memory-recall task which directed participants’ attention either to the enjoyment of acting on desires or to the satisfaction of achieving goals. We found little evidence of context-sensitivity. In both treatments, however, judgements that favoured spontaneity were expressed with roughly the same frequency and strength as judgments that favoured self-control

Intrinsic Motivation vs. Corruption? Experimental Evidence on the Performance of Officials

There are conflicting views as to whether corruption or intrinsic motivation plays a greater role in determining the performance of public officials. We run an experiment that incorporates both viewpoints and assess the relative strength and interplay of these respective factors. The design introduces some realism into an everyday exchange between an Estimator (businessperson) and an Auditor (public official) and induces a gray area between intrinsic motivation, extortion and bribery. The Estimator can make a large transfer in the hope of avoiding unfair treatment (extortion) or obtaining an undeserved benefit (bribery). The Auditor may be intrinsically motivated to fulfill her duty or may be corrupted by transfers. We find that intrinsic motivation has a much higher impact on the performance of Auditors than corruption. In a treatment with punishment, Auditors are significantly less likely to accept a large transfer. But punishment fails to bring about favorable welfare effects due to two forces offsetting each other on the individual level. Intrinsic motivation increases for some subjects, supporting the “expressive law” literature, while it decreases for others, supporting the “crowding-out” literature. We infer that punishing officials is an unproblematic tool for fighting corruption, but its effectiveness is called into question. Policies should focus more on preserving officials’ intrinsic motivation and worry less about their corruptibility

Does communicating within a team influence individuals’ reasoning and decisions?

In recent years, experimental economics has seen a rise in the collection and analysis of choice process data, such as team communication transcripts. The main purpose of this paper is to understand whether the collection of team communication data influences how individuals reason and behave as they enter the team deliberation process, i.e. before any communication exchange. Such an influence would imply that team setups have limited validity to speak to individual reasoning processes. Our treatment manipulations allow us to isolate the effects of (1) belonging to a team, (2) actively suggesting an action to the team partner, and (3) justifying the suggestion in a written text to the team partner. Across three different tasks, we find no systematic evidence of changed suggestions and altered individual sophistication due to changes in aspects (1)-(3) of our experimental design. We thus find no threat to said validity of team setups. In addition to investigating how the team setup affects individual behavior before communication, we also investigate the sophistication of decisions after the communication. We find that sophisticated strategies are more persuasive than unsophisticated strategies, especially when communication includes written justifications, thereby explaining why teams are more sophisticated and proving rich communication to be fruitful