Leadership and Social Expectations∗

We provide experimental evidence that individuals lead by example to encourage pro-social actions to meet social expectations. Giving extra in order to encourage others to give may be due to altruism, reputational considerations or to do what individuals think is expected of them. However, the third motivation has received little attention and often is a confound of the other motivations. Our experiment is anonymous, so we abstract from reputational considerations. We develop theory to show that teasing apart altruism and social expectations requires measuring beliefs and beliefs over beliefs of what subjects do. Our results find little evidence for altruistic leadership, while social expectations play a significant role. ∗Preliminary draft. Please do not cite or distribute without the authors’ permission. Email: [email protected]