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Peer Effects in Pro-Social Behavior: Social Norms or Social Preferences?

ABSTRACT: We compare social preference and social norm based explanations for peer effects in a three-person gift-exchange experiment. In the experiment a principal pays a wage to each of two agents, who then make effort choices sequentially. In our baseline treatment we observe that the second agent's effort is influenced by the effort choice of the first agent, even though there are no material spillovers between agents. This peer effect is predicted by the Fehr-Schmidt (1999) model of social preferences. As we show from a norms-elicitation experiment, it is also consistent with social norms compliance. A conditional logit investigation of the explanatory power of payoff inequality and elicited norms finds that the second agent's effort is best explained by the social preferences model. In further experiments we find that the peer effects change as predicted by the social preferences model. Again, a conditional logit analysis favors an explanation based on social preferences, rather than social norms. Our results suggest that, in our context, the social preferences model provides a parsimonious explanation for the observed peer effect.

SUBMITTER: Gachter S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5443401 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Peer Effects in Pro-Social Behavior: Social Norms or Social Preferences?

Gächter Simon S Nosenzo Daniele D Sefton Martin M

Journal of the European Economic Association 20130601 3

We compare social preference and social norm based explanations for peer effects in a three-person gift-exchange experiment. In the experiment a principal pays a wage to each of two agents, who then make effort choices sequentially. In our baseline treatment we observe that the second agent's effort is influenced by the effort choice of the first agent, even though there are no material spillovers between agents. This peer effect is predicted by the Fehr-Schmidt (1999) model of social preference ...[more]

PMID: 28553193

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Project description:Pro-social behaviors are defined as voluntary actions that benefit others. Comparative studies have mostly focused on investigating the presence of pro-sociality across species in an intraspecific context. Taken together, results on both primates and non-primate species indicate that reliance on cooperation may be at work in the selection and maintenance of pro-social sentiments. Dogs appear to be the ideal model when investigating a species' propensity for pro-sociality in an interspecific context because it has been suggested that as a consequence of domestication, they evolved an underlying temperament encouraging greater propensity to cooperate with human partners. In a recent study, using a food delivery paradigm, dogs were shown to preferentially express pro-social choices toward familiar compared to unfamiliar conspecifics. Using the same set-up and methods in the current study, we investigated dogs' pro-social preferences toward familiar and unfamiliar human partners. We found that dogs' pro-social tendencies did not extend to humans and the identity of the human partners did not influence the rate of food delivery. Interestingly, dogs tested with their human partners spent more time gazing at humans, and did so for longer after food consumption had ended than dogs tested with conspecific partners in the initial study. To allow comparability between results from dogs tested with a conspecific and a human partner, the latter were asked not to communicate with dogs in any way. However, this lack of communication from the human may have been aversive to dogs, leading them to cease performing the task earlier compared to the dogs paired with familiar conspecifics in the prior study. This is in line with previous findings suggesting that human communication in such contexts highly affects dogs' responses. Consequently, we encourage further studies to examine dogs' pro-social behavior toward humans taking into consideration their potential responses both with and without human communication.

Dataset Information

Peer Effects in Pro-Social Behavior: Social Norms or Social Preferences?

Publications

Peer Effects in Pro-Social Behavior: Social Norms or Social Preferences?

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