Thresholds of Pro-Social Conformity

Work—especially in the domain of public administration or other mission-oriented organizations—can be driven by social, rather than private financial incentives. Moreover, scholarship on peer effects suggests that an individual’s pro-social attitudes can be shaped by the behavior of those around her. The aim of this proposed lab experiment is to 1) build empirical evidence for a theory of pro-social conformity in organizations and 2) to construct a lab module simulating cooperation in the workplace which can also be used to test extensions of our main hypotheses in future experiments. We propose two related lab experiments (each N=300) that use a real effort task coupled with a prosocial donation to charity: a baseline experiment to establish the thresholds for prosocial conformity within groups of ten (using a strategy matrix to examine participant's own percentage of bonus income donated to charity), and an extension that examines whether the expected group generosity affects participants task effort (expected group generosity on number of tasks completed).

Co-PIs:
James Rauch, Economics department, UCSD
Justin Abraham, Economics department, UCSD