Nastiness in Groups

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Bauer, Michal; Cahlikova, Jana; Celik Katreniak, Dagmara; Chytilova, Julie; Cingl, Lubomir; Zelinsky, Tomas
• 署名单位: Charles University Prague; Czech Academy of Sciences; Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences; Charles University Prague; University of Bonn; City St Georges, University of London; Czech Academy of Sciences; Prague University of Economics & Business; Technical University Kosice; Durham University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1542-4766
• DOI: 10.1093/jeea/jvad072
• 发表日期: 2023
• 页码: 2075-2107
• 关键词: workplace aggression; individual behavior; PUNISHMENT

摘要

This paper provides evidence showing that people are more prone to engage in nasty behavior, malevolently causing financial harm to other people at own costs, when they make decisions in a group context rather than when making choices individually on their own. We establish this behavioral regularity in a series of large-scale experiments among university students, adolescents, and nationally representative samples of adults-more than ten thousand subjects in total. We test several potential mechanisms, and the results suggest that individual nasty inclinations are systematically more likely to affect behavior when decisions are made under the cover of a group, that is, in a group decision-context that creates a perception of diffused responsibility.