Zimmermann, Jarid Emanuel
(2019).
The influence of social comparisons on cooperation and fairness.
PhD thesis, Universität zu Köln.
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Abstract
Social comparisons, that is, people’s tendency to compare their own behavior to that of other people, are an important driver of human behavior. People want to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ and they want to think of their own group as positively distinct compared to other groups. Intriguingly, most social comparisons do not affect people’s monetary payoffs, but, nevertheless, they greatly affect people’s decisions. Many important social outcomes depend on people’s willingness to implement fair decisions and cooperate, and the provision of social information offers a promising tool for increasing socially desirable outcomes. While some studies have shown reductions in energy consumption, when providing people with information about their neighbors’ energy savings, others were less successful. Unfortunately, thus, the psychological mechanisms underlying the impact of social comparisons on people’s fairness and cooperation decisions are still poorly understood. In a series of controlled economic laboratory experiments, this dissertation sets out to test the relevance of psychological theories of social comparisons in order to better understand cooperation and fairness decisions. The first study reported here tests the effectiveness of social comparisons between teams as a means of increasing cooperation within teams, when teams are aware of different returns to cooperation, e.g., because teams being compared have different stakes in maintaining cooperation. We show that comparisons between groups make people more sensitive to their team member’s free-riding behavior. Here the provision of social information fires back by focusing people on their personal rather than their groups’ positive distinctiveness. The second study investigates how people acquire social comparison information about other people’s fairness decisions. Particularly when the acquired information is made public, people strategically avoid information suggesting fair decisions, thus identify the desire to appear prosocial as a key driver in information acquisition. In the third study, we investigate how children acquire social comparison information, if this information determines their relative evaluation. Here we demonstrate that even children from about 6-7 years are already able to strategically acquire social comparisons, thereby managing their social image and inhibiting their preference for desirable social comparisons. In the fourth study, I investigate whether and how people desire to set an example for others by affecting the social information available to others via their own cooperation decisions. I find that, even if there are no monetary incentives for setting an example, people desire to set an example for others, particularly when social norms are made salient. In sum, this dissertation presents converging evidence for the opportunities and risks involved in leveraging the power of social comparisons to increase cooperation and fairness.
| Item Type: | Thesis (PhD thesis) | ||||||||
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| URN: | urn:nbn:de:hbz:38-104839 | ||||||||
| Date: | 9 December 2019 | ||||||||
| Language: | English | ||||||||
| Faculty: | Faculty of Management, Economy and Social Sciences | ||||||||
| Divisions: | Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences > Economics > Microeconomics, Institutions and markets > Professorship for Experimental and Behavioral Economics | ||||||||
| Subjects: | Psychology Economics |
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| Date of oral exam: | 9 December 2019 | ||||||||
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| Funders: | Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft - Relativity in Social Cognition, C-SEB | ||||||||
| Refereed: | Yes | ||||||||
| URI: | http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/id/eprint/10483 |
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