SELF-IMAGE AND WILLFUL IGNORANCE IN SOCIAL DECISIONS

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Grossman, Zachary; van der Weele, Joel J.
• 署名单位: State University System of Florida; Florida State University; University of Amsterdam; Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1542-4766
• DOI: 10.1093/jeea/jvw001
• 发表日期: 2017
• 页码: 173-217
• 关键词: moral wiggle room; illusory preference; strategic ignorance; INFORMATION; IDENTITY; games; dont; want; NORM; hurt

摘要

Avoiding information about adverse welfare consequences of self-interested decisions, or willful ignorance, is an important source of socially harmful behavior. To understand this issue, we analyze a Bayesian signaling model of an agent who cares about self-image and has the opportunity to learn the social benefits of a personally costly action. We show that willful ignorance can serve as an excuse for selfish behavior by obfuscating the signal about the decision-maker's preferences, and help maintain the idea that the agent would have acted virtuously under full information. We derive several behavioral predictions that are inconsistent with either outcome-based preferences or social-image concern and conduct experiments to test them. Our findings, as well as a number of previous experimental results, offer support for these predictions and thus, the broader theory of self-signaling.