Locus of Control and Prosocial Behavior

Andor, Mark; Cox, James D.; Gerster, Andreas; Price, Michael; Sommer, Stephan; Tomberg, Lukas

doi:10.3386/w30359

Cited by 9 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Locus of control is the extent to which individuals attribute success or outcome to their own behavior (internal locus of control) or to factors outside their behavior (e.g., luck or fate; external locus of control) (Rotter 1966). Locus of control has been used to explain economic action such investment in risky assets, health behavior (e.g., consumption of alcohol), and prosocial behavior (Salamanca et al 2020;Caliendo and Hennecke 2020;Andor et al 2022). With regard to information avoidance, individuals who attribute their own behavior to success might be more interested in information than people who think that outcome is determined by fate.…”

Section: (Possible) Determinants Of Information Avoidancementioning

confidence: 99%

Health and environmental implications of food consumption: What do people want to know?

Grüner¹,

Mußhoff²

2023

Preprint

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Contradicting rational choice, people sometimes do not want information even if it is free (information avoidance). People may want to enjoy the pleasure of unhealthy food wrapped in plastic packaging today and do not want to be informed about the long-term consequences for their health and the environment. Using a quota-representative survey of the German population (N=1,000), we aim to identify behavioral determinants that are associated with information avoidance in the food sector. Participants are asked to what extent they do (not) want to receive information in the realm of the food sector using 10 different hypothetical situations. Information avoidance is measured on a 5-point Likert scale (1=“Definitely want to know” to 5=“Definitely don’t want to know”). This procedure ensures that relatively poor people do not give systematically biased answers due to a lack of financial resources. Our findings can be summarized as follows: First, preferences/personality traits can partly predict information avoidance. For example, positive reciprocity, altruism, internal locus of control, and self-esteem are negatively associated with information avoidance. The relevance of trust and patience is limited to environmental-related consequences. Second, individuals are less willing to forgo information the better they rate their health status. Dietary habits can better predict information avoidance than diseases such as food allergy, cardiovascular, cholesterol, or diabetes. Third, women and men are more likely not to avoid information if they find it useful. Risk-seeking, altruism, and positive reciprocity are, roughly speaking, stronger negatively pronounced with men—trust is stronger negatively pronounced with women.

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Section: (Possible) Determinants Of Information Avoidancementioning

confidence: 99%

Health and environmental implications of food consumption: What do people want to know?

Grüner¹,

Mußhoff²

2023

Preprint

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show abstract

“…They also invest more in their own human capital (Coleman and DeLeire, 2003;Piatek and Pinger, 2016) and in their children's cognitive development (Lekfuangfu et al, 2018). Last, those with greater internal control engage more in prosocial behaviour (Andor et al, 2022), save more (Cobb-Clark et al, 2016), invest more in risky assets (Salamanca et al, 2020), and are less susceptible to problem gambling (Gong and Zhu, 2019), energy poverty (Awaworyi Churchill and Smyth, 2021) and homelessness (Budria et al, 2023).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Taking Back Control? Quasi-Experimental Evidence on the Impact of Retirement on Locus of Control

Clark,

Zhu

2023

The Economic Journal

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We use Australian panel data to examine the impact of retirement on individual locus of control, a socio-emotional skill with substantial explanatory power for a broad range of life outcomes. Exploiting the eligibility age for the Australian Age Pension, we find that retirement leads to increased internal locus of control. This greater internal control explains around one-third and one-fifth of the positive effects of retirement on health and subjective well-being, respectively. We also show that locus of control is much more malleable at retirement than the other socio-emotional skills of the Big-Five personality traits, risk and time preferences, and trust.

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Disruptions to early childhood preschool services during a pandemic: Evidence from India

Ravindran,

Shah

2024

J Popul Econ

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Much less is known about the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the provision of early childhood preschool services relative to research on school closures. We conducted surveys of more than 5000 early childhood service providers and leverage temporal and spatial variation in India’s intensity of lockdowns to quantify disruptions to preschool services under the world’s largest early childhood development program between areas with different strictness of lockdown measures. We document a 23 percentage point reduction in the provision of preschool services in red zone lockdown areas (strictest measures) relative to green zone lockdown areas (least strict measures). We find that pre-COVID measures of high worker locus of control and public service motivation offset the reduction in differential preschool service provision by 27–37%.

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Locus of Control and Prosocial Behavior

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

Health and environmental implications of food consumption: What do people want to know?

Health and environmental implications of food consumption: What do people want to know?

Taking Back Control? Quasi-Experimental Evidence on the Impact of Retirement on Locus of Control

Disruptions to early childhood preschool services during a pandemic: Evidence from India

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