Processing Social Preferences
Final Report Abstract
People are not always selfish. They are generous to other people, they are kind if treated kindly but also unkind if treated unkindly, and people are honest also in situations in which dishonesty cannot be detected. At the same time, people are diverse; there is heterogeneity in this behaviour. In this project, we use the analysis of response time, interventions as cognitive load or time pressure, and eyetracking in order to get a better understanding of the psychological processes that are the basis for these behaviours. This is interesting for two main reasons. First, it tells us something about the nature of these differences. For example, when a totally selfish person has to make a choice between two options that yield some payoff for this and another person then this person can ignore the information about the other’s payoff. So, the gaze of such a person is different from a person who looks at all the payoffs, and we can infer something about the prosociality of this person even if we do not observe the decision. We found such differences, for example in a game in which they can lie or be honest. We find people who ignore the information that would be necessary to profitably cheat, which is evidence that they are truly honest in this situation. Second, there are theoretical models that predict that people have impulsive reactions, which might be overridden when there is enough time and cognitive capacity to think carefully about the problem. With respect to social preferences, the question arose whether people are impulsively selfish or impulsively fair. This is for example important because it would predict how people behave under time pressure or cognitive load. So far, the evidence was mixed. Our experiments do not give an answer in one direction or the other. We found that also in this respect there is heterogeneity. The impulse of prosocial people is prosocial, and the selfish people have a selfish impulse. So, neither group has to control their intuition if they behave according to their preferences. In many studies, we used eye-tracking in order to investigate where people look. Usually, we find that people look at the information they individually need for their decision, but there are notable exceptions. For example, in an experiment where people could redistribute payoffs of other participants, they cared about particularly poor as well as particularly rich people. However, in the decision, the existence of particularly rich people did not affect their decision. This requires further investigation but it could mean that they are envious but overcome the impulse to overly tax the rich. Eye-tracking can also be used in an active way, for example to transmit gaze information to other people. We found that people were able to detect how prosocial other people are, just based on how and where they look. However, when those whose gaze is transmitted have a strategic incentive to appear prosocial, then they modify how their gaze and the gaze information does not help anymore to detect prosociality.
Publications
- (2016). Response Time and Click Position: Cheap Indicators of Preferences, Journal of the Economics Science Association, 2(2), 109-126
Chen, F. & Fischbacher, U.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s40881-016-0026-6) - (2020) Cognitive Processes Underlying Distributional Preferences: A Response Time Study." Experimental Economics, 23(2), 421-446
Chen, F., & Fischbacher, U.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-019-09618-x) - (2020). Strategic gaze: an interactive eye-tracking study, in: Experimental Economics
Hausfeld, J., von Hesler, K., & S. Goldlücke, S.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-020-09655-x)
