“Do the right thing:” The effects of moral suasion on cooperation

Abstract

The use of moral appeals to a¤ect the behavior of others is pervasive (from the pulpit to ethics classes) but little is known about the e¤ects of moral suasion on behavior. In a series of experiments we study whether moral suasion a¤ects behavior in voluntary contribution games and the mechanisms by which behavior is altered. We …nd that observing a message with a moral standard according to the golden rule or, alternatively, utilitarian philosophy, results in a signi…cant but transitory increase in contributions above the levels observed for subjects that did not receive a message or received a message that advised them to contribute without a moral rationale. When players have the option of punishing each other after the contribution stage, the e¤ect of the moral messages on contributions becomes persistent: punishments and moral messages interact to sustain cooperation. We also investigate the mechanisms through which moral suasion operates and …nd it a¤ects both expectations and preferences.JEL codes: C9, H41.

Increasing altruistic and cooperative behaviour with simple moral nudges

“…Then we investigate whether the positive effect of moral nudges is limited to the choice immediately after the nudge, or persists to a subsequent interaction. In this study we focus only on altruistic behaviour for two reasons: first, Dal Bó & Dal Bó 33 have already shown that a similar moral nudge persists over time in a repeated PD; second, Study 1 and Study 2 suggest that our moral nudges work similarly in the PD and the DG, therefore, although we cannot logically infer that our moral nudges equally persist to a second round both in the DG and in the PD, we expect no major differences. And, moreover, we focus only on the "personal" norm since, as shown in Studies 1 and 2, the "social" norm gives rise to similar results.…”

“…While previous research has consistently found that moral nudges and, more generally, normbased policy interventions persist at least for some time 33,[36][37] , there is a lot of uncertainty concerning their spillover effect across contexts. More specifically, to the best of our knowledge, no study has explored spillover effects in the domain of simple moral nudges as the ones we explore in this work.…”

“…In short, this research suggests that people tend to follow the choice that they perceive to be the norm in a given context, which, in turn, suggests that simple reminders that make the morality of an action salient may have a positive impact on pro-social behaviour. Along these lines, for example, it has been shown that religious reminders favour honesty 31 and cooperation [32][33] in economic games. Furthermore, changing the names of the available actions to make them seem less or more moral has a large effect on people's behaviour in decision problems where there is a tension between equity and efficiency [34][35] .…”

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

“…If explicitly faced with information about the behaviour of out-group members, might these individuals change their behavioural strategy from conformist to counter-conformist? This research can contribute to the emerging stream of literature using moral suasion to encourage pro-social behaviours (Brañas-Garza, 2007;Ferraro & Miranda, 2013;Dal Bó & Dal Bó, 2014;Bonan, Cattaneo, d'Adda & Tavoni, 2019;Bott, Cappelen, Sørensen & Tungodden, in press;Capraro et al, in press).…”

Foreword: Special Issue in Honor of Reinhard Selten’s 85th Birthday

“…Unlike commonly assumed in the punishment literature, the authors observe that participants favor post hoc redistribution rules over purely punitive rules. As in Dal B o and Dal B o (2014), rules incorporate communication elements in the form of appeals to moral sentiments rather than simple peer-to-peer appeals to contribution. Finally, as anticipated in Hoffmann et al (2013), participants prefer to moderate feelings of resentment by choosing rules that provide information about aggregated rather than about individual contributions.…”