Heterogeneity in banker culture and its influence on dishonesty

The social sciences are going through what has been described as a ‘reproducibility crisis’1,2. Highly influential findings derived from accessible populations, such as laboratories and crowd-sourced worker platforms, are not always replicated. Less attention has been given to replicating findings that are derived from inaccessible populations, and recent high-profile replication attempts explicitly excluded such populations3. Pioneering experimental work4 offered a rare glimpse into banker culture and found that bankers, in contrast to other professionals, are more dishonest when they think about their job. Given the importance of the banking sector, and before academics or policy-makers rely on these findings as an accurate diagnosis of banking culture, an exploration of their generalizability is warranted. Here we conduct the same incentivized task with bankers and non-bankers from five different populations across three continents (n = 1,282 participants). In our banker studies in the Middle East and Asia Pacific (n = 148 and n = 620, respectively), we observe some dishonesty, although—in contrast to the original study4—this was not significantly increased among bankers primed to think about their work compared to bankers who were not primed. We also find that inducing non-banking professionals to think about their job does not have a significant effect on honesty. We explore sampling and methodological differences to explain the variation in findings in relation to bankers and identify two key points. First, the expectations of the general population regarding banker behaviour vary across jurisdictions, suggesting that banking culture in the jurisdiction of the original study4 may not be consistent worldwide. Second, having approached 27 financial institutions, many of which expressed concerns of adverse findings, we expect that only banks with a sound culture participated in our study. The latter introduces possible selection bias that may undermine the generalizability of any similar field study. More broadly, our study highlights the complexity of undertaking a high-fidelity replication of sensitive, highly publicized fieldwork with largely inaccessible populations resulting from institutional and geographical barriers. For policy-makers, this work suggests that caution should be exercised in generalizing the findings of the original study4 to other populations

Cooperate without looking: Why we care what people think and not just what they do

Evolutionary game theory typically focuses on actions but ignores motives. Here, we introduce a model that takes into account the motive behind the action. A crucial question is why do we trust people more who cooperate without calculating the costs? We propose a game theory model to explain this phenomenon. One player has the option to “look” at the costs of cooperation, and the other player chooses whether to continue the interaction. If it is occasionally very costly for player 1 to cooperate, but defection is harmful for player 2, then cooperation without looking is a subgame perfect equilibrium. This behavior also emerges in population-based processes of learning or evolution. Our theory illuminates a number of key phenomena of human interactions: authentic altruism, why people cooperate intuitively, one-shot cooperation, why friends do not keep track of favors, why we admire principled people, Kant’s second formulation of the Categorical Imperative, taboos, and love.Mathematic

Peer-to-peer solar and social rewards: evidence from a field experiment

Observability and social rewards have been demonstrated to influence the adoption of pro-social behavior in a variety of contexts. This study implements a field experiment to examine the influence of observability and social rewards in the context of a novel pro-social behavior: peer-to-peer solar. Peer-to-peer solar offers an opportunity to households who cannot have solar on their homes to access solar energy from their neighbors. However, unlike solar installations, peer-to-peer solar is an invisible form of pro-environmental behavior. We implemented a set of randomized campaigns using Facebook ads in the Massachusetts cities of Cambridge and Somerville, in partnership with a peer-to-peer company, which agreed to offer to a subsample of customers the possibility to share “green reports” online, providing shareable information about their greenness. We find that interest in peer-to-peer solar increases by up to 30% when “green reports,” which would make otherwise invisible behavior visible, are mentioned in the ad

Don’t get it or don’t spread it: comparing self-interested versus prosocial motivations for COVID-19 prevention behaviors

AbstractCOVID-19 prevention behaviors may be seen as self-interested or prosocial. Using American samples from MTurk and Prolific (total n = 6850), we investigated which framing is more effective—and motivation is stronger—for fostering prevention behavior intentions. We evaluated messaging that emphasized personal, public, or personal and public benefits of prevention. In initial studies (conducted March 14–16, 2020), the Public treatment was more effective than the Personal treatment, and no less effective than the Personal + Public treatment. In additional studies (conducted April 17–30, 2020), all three treatments were similarly effective. Across all these studies, the perceived public threat of coronavirus was also more strongly associated with prevention intentions than the perceived personal threat. Furthermore, people who behaved prosocially in incentivized economic games years before the pandemic had greater prevention intentions. Finally, in a field experiment (conducted December 21–23, 2020), we used our three messaging strategies to motivate contact-tracing app signups (n = 152,556 newsletter subscribers). The design of this experiment prevents strong causal inference; however, the results provide suggestive evidence that the Personal + Public treatment may have been more effective than the Personal or Public treatment. Together, our results highlight the importance of prosocial motives for COVID-19 prevention.</jats:p