Engel and Kurschilgen (2014) on Introspection

Christoph Engel and Michael Kurschilgen, “The Jurisdiction of the Man Within – Introspection, Identity, and Cooperation in a Public Good Experiment.” Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, 2015/1, December 2014 [pdf].

• This paper features a lab experiment involving a repeated public good game, where groups of four players individually decide each round how much of their endowment they will invest in a public good. The choices of every player in every previous round are known to everyone. In such games, contributions tend to fall over time, and a significant minority of people never contribute. The modal behavior is “conditional cooperator,” where people contribute something as long as others do.

• Each round features a second stage as well, where the players are asked about their expectations or beliefs. The various “treatments” in the game differ based on the question that is posed. 

• “Introspection” for the authors involves a comparison of your own behavior with a normative goal. The authors contend that introspection can be induced in the players via the right sort of belief question. 

• One question aims at making salient the “normative ideal,” asking players what they think everyone should contribute. A second treatment attempts to direct focus to the “normative minimum,” where players are asked what is the least amount that players should be expected to contribute. 

• The authors suggest that players will have an element of their utility connected to their “identity.” This term lowers a player's utility to the extent that the player's actual behavior falls short of her ideal. But the extent of such potential lowering depends on how clear it is that the player has not lived up to her professed ideal. 

• Any sort of introspection might increase the mental clarity concerning how a player's behavior falls short of her own ideal. But the Normative Minimum question will, the authors hypothesize, go the furthest in reducing her “moral wiggle room.” Any contribution that does not at least match what she think is minimally required will be a stark piece of hypocrisy. 

• Sure enough, the “normative minimum” question leads to substantially more cooperation, and furthermore, greatly slows down the erosion of cooperation over time.