Journal of Economic Psychology最新文献

We explore the psychological mechanisms underlying self-serving redistribution decisions in an experimental setting. This self-serving bias in redistribution has been attributed not only to self-interest, but also to constructs such as differing beliefs about the hard work or luck underlying inequality, differing fairness views, and differing perceptions of social norms. In this study, we directly measure each of these potential mechanisms and compare their mediating roles in the relationship between status and redistribution. In our experiment, participants complete real-effort tasks and then are randomly assigned a high or low pay rate per correct answer to exogenously induce (dis)advantaged status. Participants are then paired and those assigned the role of dictator decide how to divide their joint earnings. We find that advantaged dictators keep more for themselves than disadvantaged dictators and report different fairness views and beliefs about task performance, but not different perceptions of social norms. Further, only fairness views play a significant mediating role between status and allocation differences, suggesting this is the primary mechanism underlying self-serving differences in support for redistribution.

Competitive rewards are often assigned on a regular basis, e.g., in annual salary negotiations or employee-of-the-month schemes. The repetition of competitions can imply that opponents are matched based on earlier outcomes. Using a real-effort experiment, we examine how cheating and effort evolve in two rounds of competitions in which subjects compete with different types of opponents in the second round (random/based on the first-round outcome). We find that (i) losing causes competitors to increase cheating in the second round while winning implies a tendency to reduce cheating. A similar effect is found with regard to effort, as losers increase effort to a larger extent than winners. (ii) Competitor matching does not significantly affect behavior.

This study analyses the relationship between the willingness to take risk (WTR) of a sentimental couple and its individual components. Using a survey-based measure collected in a lab experiment with 126 couples, we estimate a joint model for explaining female, male, and couple WTR. We control for socio-demographic characteristics and personality traits in the individual risk specifications and for the length of the relationship in the joint risk specification. We find that individual WTR is related to personality more than to socio-demographic variables. Couple WTR is equally determined by the individual WTR of each partner, once endogeneity arising from unobservable common factors is considered. This implies that risk-averse (risk-tolerant) individuals appear to be willing to take more (less) risk when behaving with the partner than he/she would like when behaving individually.

This study proposes a conflict between the impulse to express negative emotions and the temptation to behave selfishly in the cognitive control processes of complying with cooperative norms. We conduct an experiment with two tasks (cost and no-cost) in a prisoner’s dilemma game with third-party punishment and apply the transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to modulate the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). The results indicate significant differences in tDCS effects on third-party punishment between two cost conditions. In the no-cost task, third parties in the cathodal condition report higher negative emotional responses and assign more punishment to norm violators than those in the sham condition. However, the tDCS effect on third-party punishment is not significant in the cost task. Our results help address the inconsistent findings in prior literature regarding the role of the right DLPFC in norm compliance and deepen our understanding of the cognitive control process in enforcing cooperative norms by third parties.

We elicit and compare behaviors in the laboratory and on a smartphone application that we developed for this study. Our participant pool consists of university students who are subjected to identical incentives and selection criteria. Behavior is similar across samples in measures of attitudes towards risk, effort, cognitive ability, strategic reasoning, trust, and lying aversion. Additionally, participants show comparable beliefs about the actions of the other players. We also identify certain quantitative differences between the two groups. Specifically, subjects using the app donate more in the dictator game, are faster, and show less consistency. These findings show the potential of using smartphone applications to organize experiments, and emphasize the importance of a clear and simple interface in this environment.

Literature suggests that human perception and behavior vary with physical temperature. We conducted an experiment to study how different ambient temperatures impact social behavior and perception: subjects undertook a series of tasks measuring various aspects of social behavior and perception under three temperature conditions (cold vs. optimal vs. warm). Despite well-established findings on the effects of temperature, our data suggest that ambient temperature has no relevant influence on social behavior and perception. We corroborate our finding of a null effect using equivalence testing and provide a discussion considering recent failed replication attempts in this field of research and related studies on heat and violence.

We investigate the effect of prosocial rewards on goal-setting and performance of women. We designed an online experiment where participants performed real-effort tasks. In our experimental treatments, participants were asked to set their own goals as to how many tasks they would perform within a fixed time frame. Contrary to previous research indicating that women tend to underperform due to setting lower goals for themselves compared to men, our study demonstrates that when rewards are prosocial, women set challenging, but achievable and their performance improves. Our results suggest that prosocial incentives within the goal-setting scheme can be an effective way to help women improve their performance.

Financial well-being is getting more attention in research and consumer policy, but there is limited understanding of its determinants. In this study, the effects of two psychological factors (self-control and future time perspective) are studied on two components of financial well-being (current money management stress and expected future financial security). Using structural equation modelling in data from 16 countries (n = 15,773), we find that self-control and future time perspective have both direct and indirect effects on the components of financial well-being. The indirect effects are mediated by past and present financial behaviour and have smaller effect sizes than the direct effects. Self-control is the main determinant of current money management stress, while future time perspective is the main determinant of expected future financial security. Our results emphasize that financial well-being should not be treated as a one-dimensional construct. Instead, the interventions for improving financial well-being should clearly target either its present or future component and consider psychological characteristics in their design.

People often ignore the real value of money and focus on its nominal value, a phenomenon known as money illusion. In the present study, we conduct two transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) experiments and test the role of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in money illusion. We find that anodal stimulation over the mPFC significantly increases money illusion in an evaluative task, and this anodal stimulation effect can be replicated in an incentivized task in the context of financial choices. Our study sheds light on the neural mechanisms underlying the money illusion.

We replicate the finding of Lefgren et al. (2015) showing that professional basketball coaches in the NBA discontinuously change their starting lineup more often after narrow losses than after narrow wins. This result is consistent with outcome bias because such narrow outcomes are conditionally uninformative. As our paper shows, this pattern is not restricted to the NBA; we also find evidence of outcome bias in the top women’s professional basketball league and college basketball. Finally, we show that outcome bias in coaching decisions generalizes to the National Football League (NFL). We conclude that outcome bias is credible and robust, although it has weakened over time in some instances.