Project Details
Projekt
Processing Social Preferences
Applicant
Professor Dr. Urs Fischbacher
Subject Area
Accounting and Finance
Term
from 2012 to 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 215899445
There is abundant evidence that people are not exclusively selfish, and as a consequence of this evidence, non-selfish motives like reciprocity or inequity aversion have been incorporated in economic theories. ln this project, we plan to go beyond the behavioral investigation of these motives and plan to study the underlying decision processes. Such process models provide a more detailed description of human behavior and can make predictions on how features of the environment affect behavior that are irrelevant in standard economic models. ln the first funding phase, we have focused on the processes underlying motives such as equity, efficiency, reciprocity and reputation concerns. ln the second funding period, we plan to continue this endeavor, investigating new facets of social preferences. First, when assessing the kindness or unkindness of an action, people do not only consider the outcome but also take into account who is responsible and assess the intention behind an action. We plan to investigate the processing of these determinants when people attribute blame and praise. Second, we plan to investigate the information acquisition processes in a lying experiment in order to discriminate between different forms of lying aversion. Finally, we plan to address the processing of norms when they are in conflict with each other. We will investigate the case of in-group favoritism and different fairness principles. in the first phase, we have used cognitive load and the analysis of response time in order to identify the processes. In the second phase, we plan to focus on the information processing and we plan to use eye-tracking as a tool to do so. There are three main benefits from such an analysis. First, eye-tracking can help to discriminate between different theories when they require the use of different information, or when they predict the use of information in a specific way such as heuristic models. Second, eye tracking can relate the heterogeneity in behavior to heterogeneity in the information processing. For example, Fiedler et al. (2013) have shown in a social value orientation task that more selfish people look more frequently at their own payoff than at the payoff of the other person. The third benefit of an eye-tracking analysis relates to the discussion about dual process theories (Strack & Deutsch, 2004). Eye-tracking can be used as an additional tool in order to distinguish between automatic and controlled processing when the two modes of processing have different information requirements. lt can reveal what kind of information receives more and, in particular, what information receives quicker attention.
DFG Programme
Research Units
