Power, Hierarchy and Social Preferences

Power, hierarchy and social preferences

I ran an experiment in order to evaluate the relationship, if any, between power, or the search for power, and the degree of altruism. In particular I experimentally tested whether an organization structured in a strictly hierarchical way was able to reduce the degree of altruism of a group of experimental subjects. The subjects were divided into groups and played a series of dictator and ultim...

Hierarchy in the mind: The predictive power of social dominance orientation across social contexts and domains

The power of conventions: A theory of social preferences

People often act as if they care about others’ welfare as well as their own (i.e. have “social preferences”). One plausible assumption is that people have preferences for social implications of their actions, determined by exogenous “conventions”, in addition to the material consequences of actions. I construct games with conventions using the psychological games framework developed in Geanakop...

Social Preferences and Competition

There is a general presumption that social preferences can be ignored if markets are competitive. Market experiments (Smith 1962) and recent theoretical results (Dufwenberg et al. 2008) suggest that competition forces people to behave as if they were purely selfinterested. We qualify this view. Social preferences are irrelevant if and only if two conditions are met: separability of preferences ...

Beliefs and Social Preferences

Why do people sacrifice to help others in some situations, but not in others? Besides a direct taste for helping others, I study three additional psychological motivations that involve beliefs: social-signaling, which holds that a person wants others to think of her as fair-minded; self-signaling, which says she would like to think of herself that way; and beliefs-based altruism, which says tha...