Social Status Differences in Altruism, Fairness and Retaliatory Defection in an Unequal Country

Previous research has claimed that higher-status individuals tend to be less prosocial than lower-status individuals, especially under conditions of inequality. It is also argued that lower-status individuals have more hostile reactions and more retaliatory defection to non-cooperators. Thus, low-status individuals are expected to be both prosocial and antisocial. Using simple behavioral games, we study the relationship of the objective and subjective socioeconomic status of individuals with altruism, fairness, and retaliatory defection in Chile, a country characterized by deeply entrenched socioeconomic inequality and segregation. Study 1 shows that under manipulated economic inequality conditions, higher objective status participants are more altruistic when enjoying a slight financial advantage. In contrast, lower objective status participants did not condition their altruistic behavior to their relative economic rank. Study 2 shows that manipulated economic inequality did not moderate the relationship between social status (either objective or subjective) and fairness. Finally, Study 3 indicates that participants of lower subjective status retaliated more strongly against non-cooperative peers. These results qualify the allegedly negative effect of social status on prosocial and antisocial behavior under conditions of socioeconomic inequality.

High Compensation and Unethical Reciprocity

This research extends social exchange theory by investigating unethical reciprocity induced by high compensation in employee–manager exchange relationships. Two experimental studies based on behavioral games showed that even after employees had reciprocated their managers’ wage offers with commensurate work efforts, managers’ previous compensation decisions still had potent effects on employees’ subsequent ethical behaviors. Specifically, Study 1 showed that high wages led employees to engage in unethical reciprocity to benefit their managers at the expense of honesty. In addition, when managers had the possibility of rewarding employees’ unethical reciprocity, only underpaid employees demonstrated more unethical reciprocity, and high-paid employees were not affected by their potential personal payout. Study 2 replicated Study 1’s results using different designs and behavioral games. Its results consistently showed that high-paid employees were more likely to act dishonestly to advance their managers’ interests, irrespective of their own payouts. Finally, Study 3 complemented our experimental results with initial field evidence, suggesting that higher salaries were positively related to the likelihood of police officers engaging in unethical and illegal actions to help their organization. We discuss our results by applying cross-disciplinary insights on exchange models and compensation to organizational studies.

Christian-Muslim Relations in the Shadow of Conflict

In February 2000, large-scale Christian-Muslim riots shook the Nigerian city of Kaduna, killing thousands of people and displacing tens of thousands more. Drawing on original survey data from a random sample of three hundred young men living in particularly conflict-prone neighborhoods in Kaduna, the chapter analyzes patterns of Christian-Muslim relations fifteen years after the February 2000 crisis. The author argues that local exposure to deadly intergroup violence continues to have profoundly negative effects on intergroup relations nearly two decades later. Kaduna residents on either side of the religious divide continue to exhibit high levels of mistrust and prejudice against members of the religious out-group, and demonstrate substantial out-group discrimination in behavioral games with real material stakes. The chapter highlights three interrelated consequences of exposure to large-scale episodes of intercommunal violence, each of which complicates post-conflict reconciliation: (1) the erosion of intergroup trust, (2) the tendency that the violence increases local residential segregation along communal lines, and (3) lasting psychological effects. The chapter offers micro-level evidence on each of these consequences from the Nigerian context, and cautions against expectations that post-conflict communities should quickly bounce back from large-scale interreligious violence.

Foreign Aid and State Legitimacy

ABSTRACT What are the effects of foreign aid on the perceived legitimacy of recipient states? Different donors adhere to different rules, principles, and operating procedures. The authors theorize that variation in these aid regimes may generate variation in the effects of aid on state legitimacy. To test their theory, they compare aid from the United States to aid from China, its most prominent geopolitical rival. Their research design combines within-country analysis of original surveys, survey experiments, and behavioral games in Liberia with cross-country analysis of existing administrative and Afrobarometer data from six African countries. They exploit multiple proxies for state legitimacy, but focus in particular on tax compliance and morale. Contrary to expectations, the authors find little evidence to suggest that exposure to aid diminishes the legitimacy of African states. If anything, the opposite appears to be true. Their results are consistent across multiple settings, multiple levels of analysis, and multiple measurement and identification strategies, and are unlikely to be artifacts of sample selection, statistical power, or the strength or weakness of particular experimental treatments. The authors conclude that the effects of aid on state legitimacy at the microlevel are largely benign.

Increasing prosocial behavior and decreasing selfishness in the lab and everyday life

The tension between selfishness and prosocial behavior is crucial to understanding many social interactions and conflicts. Currently little is known how to promote prosocial behaviors, especially in naturally occurring relationships outside the laboratory. We examined whether a psychological micro-intervention would promote prosocial behaviors in couples. Across two studies, we randomized dyads of couples to a micro-intervention (15 min), which increased prosocial behaviors by 28% and decreased selfish behaviors by 35% a week later in behavioral games in a dose–response manner. Using event sampling methodology, we further observed an increase in prosocial behaviors across one week that was most pronounced in participants who received the intervention. These results from the laboratory and everyday life are important for researchers interested in prosocial behavior and selfishness and have practical relevance for group interactions.

Are people with high psychoticism the true homo economicus?

Homo Economicus behaves rationally, maximizing his own utility over that of the group. The relationship with non-prosocial behavior seems clear. This behavior, typical of people with high psychoticism, could affect their decision-making. Therefore, not only the situation will be critical when making a decision, but also stable variables related to personality. In the context of the Common Goods Game, a web platform for implementing behavioral games was developed. The system allows users to play collaborative games such as the Common Goods Game. 97 students participated in that game and contributed to a common fund. They had 25 units, corresponding to 25 tenths of one subject final grade score, which can contribute to the common fund to the extent that they wish, knowing that the total amount of the common fund will be doubled and will be distributed equally among all the participants. The results show that the subjects with the lowest levels of consciousness and agreeableness traits adopt the antisocial strategy and are the ones that obtain the most benefits. Although the limitations of the study the results suggest that both types of variables, situational and dispositional, should be taken into account when studying decision-making in behavioral economics.

Behavioral Analysis in the Study of Politics: The Conflict Laboratory

Behavioral economics is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that incorporates insights from psychology to enrich standard economic models which assume perfectly rational individuals. Empirical research in behavioral economics typically employs incentivized experiments that use economic games with real money on the line. In these experiments, subjects are awarded financial payoffs based on the decisions they make (either individually or as part of a group) in an institutional context designed by the researcher. Behavioral economics is well suited for political science because behavioral economics is interdisciplinary by nature and political science is not bound by any particular research paradigm. At the same time, the method is still novel to many political scientists despite many years of its use to study political topics in a variety of research areas. What unites the application of the method to these areas is the explicit consideration of conflict. For instance, scholars have uncovered social conflict between groups (e.g., voter polarization in the United States) using behavioral games as measures, or they have designed experiments around elections to test theories of candidate and voter behavior. Because of the clear financial incentives, economic experiments are especially useful for studying people’s actual preferences in areas such as redistribution as opposed to their stated preferences. Finally, the method can be used to design institutions that will help overcome conflict over scarce resources. In sum, the strengths of behavioral economics include: (a) the ability to vary institutional contexts; (b) clear incentives that ensure valid measures of preferences; (c) direct measures of behaviors instead of stated intentions which could be confounded by outside pressures such as social desirability.

The emergence of deviance: Experiments testing the personal effects of violating a social norm

Social norms are such powerful drivers of human behavior that people conform to social norms even when they would prefer to violate them or when conforming is not in their personal material interest. Researchers have theorized that in these cases, people conform to avoid the social and psychological costs of deviance (e.g., guilt, self-deprecation, punishment). Notwithstanding the possible costs, people do decide to violate norms. We conducted two randomized experiments (N = 3,499) to explore the behavioral and psychological consequences of deviating from norms. Participants played behavioral games governed by norms of cooperation, without a mechanism for players to punish one another. Participants assigned to the treatment condition, unlike those in the control condition, were offered a monetary incentive to deviate from a strong norm of cooperation in one round of the game. Violating this norm significantly increased their propensity to violate other social norms in new settings involving new groups and new games (with no incentive to deviate). Post-treatment survey data suggest that violating norms causes people to depreciate their expectation of the costs associated with violation, but does not lead them to update their views of the self. Together, these results challenge and inform traditional views of deviance as personality or a stable individual motivation or trait, and suggest that deviance can emerge from an experience of deviance at any point in one's life.

Ethnically Biased? Experimental Evidence from Kenya

Ethnicity has been shown to shape political, social, and economic behavior in Africa, but the underlying mechanisms remain contested. We utilize lab experiments to isolate one mechanism—an individual's bias in favor of coethnics and against non-coethnics—that has been central in both theory and in the conventional wisdom about the impact of ethnicity. We employ an unusually rich research design involving a large sample of 1300 participants from Nairobi, Kenya; the collection of multiple rounds of experimental data with varying proximity to national elections; within-lab priming conditions; both standard and novel experimental measures of coethnic bias; and an implicit association test (IAT). We find very little evidence of an ethnic bias in the behavioral games, which runs against the common presumption of extensive coethnic bias among ordinary Africans and suggests that mechanisms other than a coethnic bias in preferences must account for the associations we see in the region between ethnicity and political, social, and economic outcomes.

Effect of holding office on the behavior of politicians

Reciprocity is central to our understanding of politics. Most political exchanges—whether they involve legislative vote trading, interbranch bargaining, constituent service, or even the corrupt exchange of public resources for private wealth—require reciprocity. But how does reciprocity arise? Do government officials learn reciprocity while holding office, or do recruitment and selection practices favor those who already adhere to a norm of reciprocity? We recruit Zambian politicians who narrowly won or lost a previous election to play behavioral games that provide a measure of reciprocity. This combination of regression discontinuity and experimental designs allows us to estimate the effect of holding office on behavior. We find that holding office increases adherence to the norm of reciprocity. This study identifies causal effects of holding office on politicians’ behavior.