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.

Levitt and List (2007) on Laboratory Experiments

Steven D. Levitt and John A. List, “What Do Laboratory Experiments Measuring Social Preferences Reveal about the Real World?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 21(2): 153-174, Spring, 2007.

• Five laboratory games that reveal something about pro-social behavior: (1) the Ultimatum Game; (2) the Dictator Game; (3) the Trust Game; (4) the Gift Exchange Game (where the first player requests a level of “effort” from the second player -- pdf here); and (5) the Public Goods Game (good video here). In the real world, it can be hard to differentiate between pro-social preferences and sophisticated self-interest seeking. 

• Model notation: action choice a; wealth W; stakes (or value) v; moral cost M; social norms n; and scrutiny s. 

• The higher the negative financial externality an action imposes on others, the higher the moral cost M is taken to be. (Levitt and List also assume that this externality increases with the stakes v). M is higher the greater the deviation between action a and the social norm n. M also is raised by increased scrutiny s. 

• Individual utility is U(a, v, n, s) = M(a, v, n, s) + W(a, v). Higher stakes v can raise W while raising M, too, but the authors assume that W rises more quickly with v. (Another interpretation might be that the norm changes with v, so that selfish behavior receives more social imprimatur.) 

• Scrutiny is different and typically more intense in the lab, exaggerating pro-social behaviors. (Alternatively, scrutiny from one’s children or other family members has no lab parallel.) Further, lab participants might believe that an experiment demands some pro-social behavior. 

• Behavior might be sensitive to factors that unavoidably vary between the lab and the real world: the experimenter cannot fully control the context. Participants bring context with them, and hence are playing a different game. 

• Lab participants self-select, directly or indirectly, while market participants self-select, too.