The influence of social comparisons on cooperation and fairness

Social comparisons, that is, people’s tendency to compare their own behavior to that of other people, are an important driver of human behavior. People want to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ and they want to think of their own group as positively distinct compared to other groups. Intriguingly, most social comparisons do not affect people’s monetary payoffs, but, nevertheless, they greatly affect people’s decisions. Many important social outcomes depend on people’s willingness to implement fair decisions and cooperate, and the provision of social information offers a promising tool for increasing socially desirable outcomes. While some studies have shown reductions in energy consumption, when providing people with information about their neighbors’ energy savings, others were less successful. Unfortunately, thus, the psychological mechanisms underlying the impact of social comparisons on people’s fairness and cooperation decisions are still poorly understood. In a series of controlled economic laboratory experiments, this dissertation sets out to test the relevance of psychological theories of social comparisons in order to better understand cooperation and fairness decisions. The first study reported here tests the effectiveness of social comparisons between teams as a means of increasing cooperation within teams, when teams are aware of different returns to cooperation, e.g., because teams being compared have different stakes in maintaining cooperation. We show that comparisons between groups make people more sensitive to their team member’s free-riding behavior. Here the provision of social information fires back by focusing people on their personal rather than their groups’ positive distinctiveness. The second study investigates how people acquire social comparison information about other people’s fairness decisions. Particularly when the acquired information is made public, people strategically avoid information suggesting fair decisions, thus identify the desire to appear prosocial as a key driver in information acquisition. In the third study, we investigate how children acquire social comparison information, if this information determines their relative evaluation. Here we demonstrate that even children from about 6-7 years are already able to strategically acquire social comparisons, thereby managing their social image and inhibiting their preference for desirable social comparisons. In the fourth study, I investigate whether and how people desire to set an example for others by affecting the social information available to others via their own cooperation decisions. I find that, even if there are no monetary incentives for setting an example, people desire to set an example for others, particularly when social norms are made salient. In sum, this dissertation presents converging evidence for the opportunities and risks involved in leveraging the power of social comparisons to increase cooperation and fairness

One-shot reciprocity under error management is unbiased and fragile

The error management model of altruism in one-shot interactions provides an influential explanation for one of the most controversial behaviors in evolutionary social science. The model posits that one-shot altruism arises from a domain-specific cognitive bias that avoids the error of mistaking a long-term relationship for a oneshot interaction. One-shot altruism is thus, in an intriguingly paradoxical way, a form of reciprocity. We examine the logic behind this idea in detail. In its most general form the error management model is exceedingly flexible, and restrictions about the psychology of agents are necessary for selection to be well-defined. Once these restrictions are in place, selection is well defined, but it leads to behavior that is perfectly consistent with an unbiased rational benchmark. Thus, the evolution of one-shot reciprocity does not require an evoked cognitive bias based on repeated interactions and reputation. Moreover, in spite of its flexibility in terms of psychology, the error management model assumes that behavior is exceedingly rigid when individuals face a new interaction partner. Reciprocity can only take the form of tit-for-tat, and individuals cannot adjust their behavior in response to new information about the duration of a relationship. Zefferman (2014) showed that one-shot reciprocity does not reliably evolve if one relaxes the first restriction, and we show that the behavior does not reliably evolve if one relaxes the second restriction. Altogether, these theoretical results on one-shot reciprocity do not square well with experiments showing increased altruism in the presence of payoff-irrelevant stimuli that suggest others are watching. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

United we stand, divided we fall: The limitations of between-group comparisons for fostering within-group cooperation

Between-group comparisons have been shown to foster within-group cooperation. Yet, here we demonstrate an important limitation to this result: the awareness of the own group's structural disadvantages relative to a comparison group renders within-group cooperation more fragile. More specifically, we confirm the general pattern that the desire to avoid 'lagging behind' a comparison group motivates within-group cooperation. However, having information about the own group's structural disadvantage, i.e., the own group's lower return from cooperation, leads group members to become more sensitive to how well their group 'stands together'. That is, they reduce their contributions more strongly in response to within-group free-riding. Further analyses suggest that particularly those group members who perceive that contributions are not comparable between groups reduce their contributions more strongly in response to within-group free-riding