From good institutions to generous citizens: Top-down incentives to cooperate promote subsequent prosociality but not norm enforcement

Abstract

What makes people willing to pay costs to help others, and to punish others’ selfishness? Why does the extent of such behaviors vary markedly across cultures? To shed light on these questions, we explore the role of formal institutions in shaping individuals’ prosociality and punishment. In Study 1 (N=707), American participants who reported living under higher quality cooperation-enforcing institutions (police and courts) gave significantly more in a Dictator Game (DG), but did not punish significantly more in a Third-Party Punishment Game (TPPG). In Study 1R (N=1,705), we replicated the positive relationship between reported institutional quality and DG giving observed in Study 1. In Study 2 (N=516), we experimentally manipulated institutional quality in a repeated Public Goods Game with a centralized punishment institution. Consistent with the correlational results of Study 1 and 1R, we found that centralized punishment led to significantly more prosociality in a subsequent DG compared to a no-punishment control, but had no significant direct effect on subsequent TPPG punishment (only an indirect effect via increased DG giving). Thus we present convergent evidence that the quality of institutions one is exposed to “spills over” to subsequent prosociality but not punishment. These findings support a theory of social heuristics, suggest boundary conditions on spillover effects of cooperation, and demonstrate the power of effective institutions for instilling habits of virtue and creating cultures of cooperation.

Turking overtime: how participant characteristics and behavior vary over time and day on Amazon Mechanical Turk

“…Participants in our study played only in the role of the third player (which was our decision of interest). We did not deceive participants, however – a small number of Players 1 and 2 were recruited separately and repeatedly matched with Player 3s (as per Stagnaro et al 2017). …”

Spillover modes in multiplex games: double-edged effects on cooperation and their coevolution

“…In two experiments [21,24], when subjects first participate in the iterated prisoner's dilemma (IPD) [26], they observed greater cooperation and prosocial behaviour in subsequent one-shot games. A similar increase in prosocial behaviour follows a repeated public goods game with conditions favourable for cooperation [25]. Relatedly, cooperation levels rose when switching from an IPD with a large continuation probability to one with a small continuation probability [22], as well as when switching from playing an IPD with a fixed partner to playing an IPD in which every iteration was played with a random partner [23].…”

“…An alternative approach allows strategic behaviour to be transmitted from one setting to another through peer influence and social learning [19,20]. In this paper, we draw inspiration from empirical results [21,22,23,24,25], which suggest that norms and heuristics cultivated during repeated interactions could "spill over" to affect decision making in one-shot situations.…”

LIONESS Lab – A Free Web-Based Platform for Conducting Interactive Experiments Online

“…Guidelines are available in the online documentation (https://lioness-lab.org/documentation). 4 LIONESS experiments have been used in a number of published studies which were conducted by various research groups with a range of different interactive paradigms (Arechar et al 2018;de Quidt et al 2017;Gächter et al 2016;Glowacki and Molleman 2017;Molleman and Gächter 2018;Stagnaro et al 2017). LIONESS experiments are also being used in a range of ongoing research projects, including experiments with groups of up to 12 participants and over 1,000 participants per session.…”