Deception and Self-Deception

Why are people so often overconfident? We conduct an experiment to test the hypothesis that people become overconfident to more effectively persuade or deceive others. After performing a cognitively challenging task, half of our subjects are informed that they can earn money by convincing others of their superior performance. The privately elicited beliefs of informed subjects are significantly more confident than the beliefs of subjects in the control condition. By generating exogenous variation in confidence with a noisy performance signal, we are also able to show that higher confidence indeed makes subjects more persuasive in the subsequent face-to-face interactions

Denial and alarmism in collective action problems

Förster M, van der Weele JJ. Denial and alarmism in collective action problems. Tinbergen Institute Discussion Paper. Vol TI 2018-019/I. Amsterdam ; Rotterdam: Tinbergen Institute; 2018.We analyze communication about the social returns to investment in a public good. We model two agents who have private information about these returns as well as their own taste for cooperation, or social preferences. Before deciding to contribute or not, each agent submits an unverifiable report about the returns to the other agent. We show that even if the public good benefits both agents, there are incentives to misrepresent information. First, others' willingness to cooperate generates an incentive for "alarmism", the exaggeration of social returns in order to opportunistically induce more investment. Second, if people also want to be perceived as cooperators, a "justification motive" arises for low contributors. As a result, equilibrium communication features "denial" about the returns, depressing contributions. We illustrate the model in the context of institutional inertia and the climate change debate

Casting doubt: Image concerns and the communication of social impact

Förster M, van der Weele JJ. Casting doubt: Image concerns and the communication of social impact. The Economic Journal. 2021;131:2887-2919.We investigate strategic communication about the social impact of costly prosocial actions. A ‘sender’ with noisy information about impact sends a cheap-talk message to a ‘receiver’, upon which both agents choose whether to act. In the presence of social preferences and image concerns, the sender trades off persuasion, exaggerating impact to induce receiver action, and justification, downplaying impact to cast doubt on the effectiveness of action and excuse her own passivity. In an experiment on charitable giving we find evidence for both motives. In line with our theory and a justification motive, increasing image concerns reduces communication of positive impact

A Test of Dual-Process Reasoning in Charitable Giving

Previous economic experiments on dual-process reasoning in altruistic decisions have yielded inconclusive results. However, these studies do not create a conflict between affective and cognitive motives, resulting in imperfect identification. We interact standard cognitive and affective manipulations in a giving task, and hypothesize that the affective manipulation has stronger effects when we simultaneously put the cognitive system under load. In line with earlier results, we find little evidence for dual-process reasoning in giving. Our independent treatment checks cast doubt on the effectiveness of standard treatment manipulations and show that both cognitive and affective manipulations consistently have opposite effects on the two sexes. We discuss the implications of our findings for economic experiments in this nascent research field

Self-Image and Strategic Ignorance in Moral Dilemmas

Avoiding information about adverse welfare consequences of self-interested decisions, orstrategic ignorance, is an important source of corruption, anti-social behavior and even atrocities. We model an agent who cares about self-image and has the opportunity to learn the social benefits of a personally costly action.  The trade-off between self-image concerns and material payoffs can lead the agent to use ignorance as an excuse, even if it is deliberately chosen. Two experiments, modeled after Dana, Weber, and Kuang (2007), show that a) many people will reveal relevant information about others' payoffs after making an ethical decision, but not before, and b)  some people are willing to pay for ignorance. These results corroborate the idea that Bayesian self-signaling drives people to avoid inconvenient facts in moral decisions