Strategic Ignorance and the Robustness of Social Preferences

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Grossman, Zachary
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Santa Barbara
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2014.1989
• 发表日期: 2014
• 页码: 2659-2665
• 关键词: social preferences; strategic ignorance; Moral wiggle room; default effects; status quo bias; Self-deception; Self-signaling; Dictator games

摘要

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.