Strategic Ignorance and the Robustness of Social Preferences
Abstract
Participants in dictator games frequently avoid learning whether their choice to maximize their own earnings will help or hurt the recipient and then choose selfishly, exploiting the “moral wiggle room” provided by their ignorance. However, this is found in an environment in which the dictator must actively learn the true payoffs, so inaction means ignorance. Does this effect persist when one must actively choose either to be ignorant or to be informed or when one must actively choose to remain ignorant? In fact, whereas 45% of dictators remain ignorant when one must click to become informed, this drops to 25% when one must click in either case and to 3% when one must click to remain ignorant. Although the exploitation of moral wiggle room is not merely an artifact, it is, much like social behavior itself, subject to environmental and psychological factors that may reinforce or undermine its impact. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1989 . This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.
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People's motivated reasoning is the tendency to interpret reality in a self-serving way.
“the reason being people's motivated reasoning (Grossman, 2014; Kunda, 1990)-the tendency to interpret reality in a self-serving way.”
From The Consequences of Participating in the Sharing Economy: A Transparency-Based Sharing Framework (2021) · cites this paper as Grossman, 2014
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Cited by
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Doing Good or Doing Well? Image Motivation and Monetary Incentives in Behaving Prosocially
Ariely, D., Bracha, A., & Meier, S. (2009) · American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/aer.99.1.544 · Cited by 1,753 · see citing works
The Consequences of Participating in the Sharing Economy: A Transparency-Based Sharing Framework
C. Köbis, N., Soraperra, I., & Shalvi, S. (2021) · Journal of Management · doi:10.1177/0149206320967740 · Cited by 129 · see citing works
- Authors
- Grossman, Z.
- Affiliations
- Department of Economics, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California 93106
- Venue
- Management Science
- Published
- 2014-11
- Volume
- 60
- Issue
- 11
- Pages
- 2659-2665
- ISSN
- 0025-1909
- 1526-5501
- Cited by
- 149
- References
- 2
- Language
- en
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