Motivated Errors

Abstract

Research support was provided by the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Business School. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Requiem for a Nudge: Framing effects in nudging honesty

“…Third, we obtain suggestive evidence for a 'convenient misperception' of the content of these norm-nudges among a sizeable subset of participants. For these participants, we observe a higher rate of lying overall, which is in line with the literature on motivated misremembering and belief distortion, among others (e.g., Carlson et al, 2018;Exley and Kessler, 2018;Gneezy et al, 2018b;Zimmermann, 2019;Bicchieri et al, 2019b;Saucet and Villeval, 2019). Lastly, we find that one reason for the overall ineffectiveness of our norm-nudge interventions is the inability to actually shift the perception of existing norms as measured by Krupka and Weber (2013).…”

“…Failure to recall the information correctly was coded, which in turn allows us to examine the behavioral differences between those who passed and those who failed the attention check. 11 Recent experimental literature on selective memory, biased recall, motivated beliefs, and belief distortion (e.g., Carlson et al, 2018;Exley and Kessler, 2018;Gneezy et al, 2018b;Zimmermann, 2019;Bicchieri et al, 2019b;Saucet and Villeval, 2019) suggests that a participant's relationship with actual behavior is malleable-often in self-serving ways. With this in mind, we pre-registered the plausible assumption that there is similar scope for such distortions in the context of norm-nudge provisions, which may carry over to behavioral differences within our paradigm.…”

Equity Concerns are Narrowly Framed

“…We make a number of decisions and assumptions in designing these multiple prices lists, and we highlight the most important ones in the following paragraph. For more detail, see Appendix C, which provides a thorough discussion on how we establish these exchange rates in a manner similar to our prior work (Exley, 2015, Forthcoming;Exley and Kessler, 2018). 23 Since subjects are in the role of social planner deciding about the payoffs of other participants, they perform the multiple price lists on behalf of the first participant rather than themselves (i.e., we ask them to choose how much money the first participant should give up to avoid doing additional time-burning tasks).…”

Motivated misremembering of selfish decisions

“…In addition, people psychologically distance themselves from their unethical actions-attributing past misdeeds to situational pressures 17 , or having been a "different person" at the time 18,19 . Moreover, people exploit uncertaintybehaving more selfishly when the consequences for others are ambiguous 20 , making selfserving mistakes 21 , and avoiding information about how their actions may have harmed others 6,22,23 . A common thread in each of these self-serving strategies is that they operate over abstract beliefs and attitudes.…”