Do the Right Thing: Preferences for Moral Behavior, Rather Than Equity or Efficiency per se, Drive Human Prosociality

Capraro, Valerio; Rand, David G.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2965067

Cited by 106 publications

(213 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…Participants received a bonus for their choices in the SHG and the TOG in addition to their participation fee ($0.50). Capraro & Rand (2018) find that PD cooperation is correlated with the TOG positively framed option (whichever that is), thus they conclude that moral preferences drive PD cooperation. We use the same methodology to contrast the following pre-registered hypotheses:…”

Section: Experimental Design and Proceduresmentioning

confidence: 83%

“…Recent work highlights that (one-shot, anonymous) PD cooperation is primarily driven by moral preferences for doing the right thing, rather than by distributional preferences for equity or efficiency (Capraro & Rand, 2018). The current paper adapts the research methodology in Capraro & Rand (2018) to investigate behavior in the SHG, where cooperation is not costly (there is no temptation to deviate from the cooperative outcome if the other player cooperates) but it is risky (cooperation pays off iff the other player cooperates).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We conduct our experiment on Amazon's Mechanical Turk (Arechar et al 2018 After making their choices, participants were matched in trios to play the Trade-Off Game (TOG) (Capraro & Rand, 2018;Tappin & Capraro, 2018). In this game, participants had to choose (as dictators)…”

Section: Experimental Design and Proceduresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This has yielded researchers to consider that people might exhibit distributional, social preferences for equity and/or 2 efficiency (Bolton & Ockenfels, 2000;Engelmann & Strobel, 2004). 1 However, this conclusion has been recently challenged by Capraro & Rand (2018), who found that cooperation in the one-shot, anonymous PD is not primarily driven by distributional motives, but rather by moral preferences for doing the right thing.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Preferences for efficiency, rather than preferences for morality, drive cooperation in the one-shot Stag-Hunt game

Capraro

Rodríguez-Lara

Ruiz-Martos

2020

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics

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Recent work highlights that cooperation in the one-shot Prisoner's dilemma (PD) is primarily driven by moral preferences for doing the right thing, rather than social preferences for equity or efficiency. By contrast, little is known on what motivates cooperation in the Stag-Hunt Game (SHG). Cooperation in the SHG fundamentally differs from cooperation in the PD in that it is not costly, but risky:players have no temptation to deviate from the cooperative outcome, but cooperation only pays off if the other player cooperates. Here, we provide data from a large (N=436), pre-registered, experiment. Contrary to what has been observed for the PD, we find that SHG cooperation is primarily driven by preferences for efficiency, rather than preferences for doing the right thing.

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Section: Experimental Design and Proceduresmentioning

confidence: 83%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Experimental Design and Proceduresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Preferences for efficiency, rather than preferences for morality, drive cooperation in the one-shot Stag-Hunt game

Capraro

Rodríguez-Lara

Ruiz-Martos

2020

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics

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“…They also found that not giving was considered to be less inappropriate than taking, and this helped explain framing effects in the dictator game when passing from the give frame to the take frame. Capraro and Rand (2018) and Tappin and Capraro (2018) found dictator game donations to be positively correlated to moral choices in the so-called Trade-Off game, suggesting that dictator game giving is primarily driven by preferences for doing what the dictator thinks it is the morally right thing to do. Capraro and Vanzo (2019) found that moral words in the instructions of the dictator game significantly impacted dictators' level of altruism.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

The Effect of Social Information in the Dictator Game with a Taking Option

Fouquet

Capraro²,

Kujal³

2019

SSRN Journal

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We experimentally study how redistribution choices are affected by positive and negative information regarding the behaviour of a previous participant in a dictator game with a taking option. We use the strategy method to identify behavioural 'types', and thus distinguish 'conformists' from 'counter-conformists', and unconditional choosers. Unconditional choosers make up the greatest proportion of types (about 80%) while only about 20% of subjects condition their responses to social information. We find that both conformity and counterconformity are driven by a desire to be seen as moral (the 'symbolization' dimension of moral identity). The main difference is that, conformity is also driven by a sensitivity to what others think ('attention to social comparison'). Unconditional giving (about 30% of players) on the other hand is mainly driven by the centrality of moral identity to the self (the 'internalization' dimension of moral identity). Social information thus seems to mainly affect those who care about being seen to be moral. The direction of effect however depends on how sensitive one is to what others think.

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Wait, did I do that? Effects of previous decisions on moral decision‐making

Frechen

Brouwer

2022

Behavioral Decision Making

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Previous studies have investigated moral decision-making by using moral dilemmas that involve a single decision. This article extends this paradigm, introducing twostage scenarios to examine how moral decision-making is influenced by previous decisions in the same narrative-especially whether people tend to stay consistent or to reconsider within a morally challenging situation. It further compares decisionmaking between two-stage and one-stage scenarios. In Study 1 (N = 239), participants read scenarios requiring two successive decisions of harming one person to spare multiple people (utilitarian action), or vice versa (deontological action), within the same narrative. Second decisions were mostly found to be consistent with first decisions. Remarkably, inconsistent responding (switching) was robustly observed in about 29% of cases. Study 2 (N = 63), using one-stage scenarios, showed that having made a previous decision in the same narrative generally decreased utilitarian responding. Potential explanations for these phenomena are discussed. The present article concludes that prior choices within the same setting significantly influence decision-making. It also reveals the potential of gaining new insights using multiplestage scenarios in moral decision-making research.

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Do the Right Thing: Preferences for Moral Behavior, Rather Than Equity or Efficiency per se, Drive Human Prosociality

Cited by 106 publications

References 44 publications

Preferences for efficiency, rather than preferences for morality, drive cooperation in the one-shot Stag-Hunt game

Preferences for efficiency, rather than preferences for morality, drive cooperation in the one-shot Stag-Hunt game

The Effect of Social Information in the Dictator Game with a Taking Option

Wait, did I do that? Effects of previous decisions on moral decision‐making

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