Journal
JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC PSYCHOLOGY
Volume 45, Issue -, Pages 253-267Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV
DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2014.10.003
Keywords
Information aversion; Avoidance behavior; Belief manipulation; Moral rules; Reluctant altruism
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Standard social choice experiments generally force subjects to make decisions about giving money to another person, but the ability to avoid information outside of the lab could lead to less altruistic or fair behavior than such experiments tend to suggest. I expand on the design of Dana, Weber, and Kuang (2007) to better study information avoidance in an experimental setting. Subjects are given the chance to avoid information about a recipient's payoffs in a dictator game. I vary the probability that a dictator's payoffs will be aligned with the recipient's in order to assess the role of beliefs on avoidance and test contradictory models. The within-subjects approach shows that even people who are generous in a stark choice will make self-serving decisions when they can avoid knowing the recipient's outcome. People avoid information more often when the self-serving choice is unlikely to hurt the recipient, which supports Rabin's model (1995) of moral rules and moral preferences. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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