AEI-DFG Ruthless People: Motivation and Socially-Harmful Selfishness

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Anja Achtziger
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology ; Economic Policy, Applied Economics
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 542609382

The recent years have shown an enormous increase in scandals involving frauds and selfish behavior throughout the world, especially in the financial sector. Such selfish behavior increasingly harms broad segments of the population in numerous countries. The present project investigates the motivational, volitional, situational, and cultural parameters of socially-harmful behavior. We will use established motivational strategies from psychology to control selfish behavior in economic paradigms to achieve more social outcomes. Our psychological interventions will be the induction of mindsets and the use of goals and action plans, each of which focuses on modifying selfish impulses in economic contexts, leading to ultimately more socially-acceptable decisions about the jointly-generated income. The economic context is established through variations of a recent, high-impact economic game that gives some participants the power to steal large amounts of the money earned in a large group. This game is the Big Robber Game (Alós-Ferrer, Garcia-Segarra, & Ritschel, Nature Human Behavior 2022). Two of the authors of this work are involved in the present German-Spanish project (one is the PI of the Spanish part of this Lead Agency application). Beyond the use of psychological interventions to reduce selfishness in economic contexts, extensions and modifications of the Big Robber Game will identify additional factors influencing selfish decisions, e.g. psychological entitlement or diffusion of responsibility. It is hypothesized that different compositions of the groups in this game, in terms of the number of powerful group members (who can potentially take money away from other members) and so-called "victims" who can actively participate in the games but whose hands are largely tied in allocating the money earned in the group, are important factors influencing the behavior of powerful group members. An important part of the project pursues a cross-cultural comparative perspective. Here, selfish vs. social behavior in the outlined economic games will be compared across countries. The first comparison will be Germany – Spain (the PI’s previous work has already pointed at country differences in prosociality between these two countries), but subsequently comparisons across a large number of countries and cultures will be made through large-scale, incentivized surveys. The project will enable theoretical development of improved models of social preferences explaining socially harmful behavior. This is important because received models of social preferences have been shown to be unsatisfactory to explain data in this context. The project follows an experimental approach. Laboratory data will be collected both in Germany and in Spain. Survey data collection will involve representative samples of several countries via appropriate provider services for field data collection.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Spain
• Partner Organisation: Agencia Estatal de Investigación
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Jaume Garcia-Segarra