Mexico has one of the largest overweight and obesity epidemics in the world and as a response, se... more Mexico has one of the largest overweight and obesity epidemics in the world and as a response, several actions aiming to reduce the obesity epidemic have been already set in place. Some of these actions include a specific action program for schools looking to turn the scholar environments into supportive environments for the infants to make healthier food choices. The influence of the environment (the so-called “choice architecture”) on people’s perceptions and decisions is studied by economists with the aim of supporting individuals’ to make healthier decisions, using tools known as “nudges”. However, "nudges" are not commonly integrated into anti-obesity strategies. We designed an intervention trying to find out whether such a small, liberty-preserving intervention could increase the effectiveness of a water-promotion campaign, when compared to the common approach of an educative talk. The intervention was developed in three schools in Mexico City and the State of Mexico...
Growing interest in using personality variables in economic research has led to the question whet... more Growing interest in using personality variables in economic research has led to the question whether personality as measured by psychology is useful to predict economic behavior. It is undoubted that personality can influence large-scale economic outcomes. Whether personality variables can also be used to understand micro-behavior in economic games is, however, less clear. We discuss the reasons for and against this assumption. In the framework of our own experiment, we test whether and which personality factors are useful in predicting behavior in the Trust Game. We can also use the Trust Game to understand how personality measures fare relatively in predicting behavior when situational constraints are strong or weak. This approach can help economists to better understand what to expect from the inclusion of personality variables in their models and experiments, and where further research might be useful and needed.
Imitation has been shown to be an important heuristic, in particular in relatively complex enviro... more Imitation has been shown to be an important heuristic, in particular in relatively complex environments. In this experiment we test whether subjects are more likely to use imitation if they are under time pressure or distracted. Subjects play a repeated Cournot oligopoly. Treatments are time pressure within the task and distractions through a second task (a Stroop-task) that has to be performed as well and influences payment. We additionally measure stress levels through salivary cortisol and heart rate. Our main findings are that time pressure and distraction can raise physiological stress levels of subjects within our task. More importantly from an economic perspective, we can also observe a corresponding behavioral change that is indicative of imitation.
Even though chronic stress is a pervasive problem in contemporary societies and is known to poten... more Even though chronic stress is a pervasive problem in contemporary societies and is known to potentially precede both adverse psychological as well as physiological conditions, its effects on decision making have not been systematically investigated. In this paper, we focus on the relation between self-reported chronic stress and self-reported as well as behaviorally shown social preferences. We measured chronic stress with the Trier Inventory for Chronic Stress [1, 2]. To determine social preferences, participants played a double anonymous dictator game. In order to control for the robustness of social preferences we employed a 2x2x2x2 design where we manipulated four variables: the frame (Give to Recipient vs. Take from Recipient), the decision maker’s gender (Female vs. Male), the recipient’s gender (Female vs. Male), and the nature of the reward (Real vs. Hypothetical). Results show that perceived chronic stress is not significantly related to social preferences in monetarily rew...
Evidence from public goods game experiments holds the promise of informing climate change policie... more Evidence from public goods game experiments holds the promise of informing climate change policies. To fulfill this promise, such evidence needs to demonstrate generalizability to this specific policy context. This paper examines whether and under which conditions behavior in public goods games generalizes to decisions about voluntary climate actions. We observe each participant in two different decision tasks: a real giving task in which contributions are used to directly reduce CO2 emissions and an abstract public goods game. Through treatment variations in this within-subjects design, we explore two factors that are candidates for affecting generalizability: the structural resemblance of contribution incentives between the tasks and the role of the subject pool, students and non-students. Our findings suggest that cooperation in public goods games is only weakly linked to voluntary climate actions and not in a uniform way. For a standard set of parameters, behavior in both tasks ...
Many recent experimental studies have shown that some subjects destroy other subjects' income... more Many recent experimental studies have shown that some subjects destroy other subjects' incomes without receiving any material benefit, and that they even incur costs to do so. In this paper, we study the boundary conditions of this phenomenon, which is referred to as anti-social behavior. We introduce a four-player destruction game, in which we vary the framing and the presence of another activity, running in parallel to the destruction game. We observe a substantial amount of destruction in the baseline condition without the parallel activity, and with a framing in the spirit of previous destruction experiments. Our results indicate that a parallel activity as well as a framing emphasizing joint ownership of the item that can be destroyed reduces destruction almost to zero. We therefore argue that the emergence of anti-social behavior is highly contingent on the contextual environment.
We study whether social norm perception in economic laboratory experiments differs between subjec... more We study whether social norm perception in economic laboratory experiments differs between subjects that participate for the first time and subjects that already participated many times. Consistent with previous studies, inexperienced subjects pronounce egalitarianism, while experienced subjects pronounce efficiency and the maximization of their own earnings. Moreover, experienced subjects evaluate exploitation and deception of other individuals in the lab as more appropriate than inexperienced subjects. Field norms also slightly differ between the two groups, but to a lower extent than lab norms. We therefore conclude that learning effects are more important than selection effects for explaining differences between inexperienced and experienced participants. We also conduct exploratory analyses on the relation between lab and field norms and find that behaving unsocial in the lab is considered substantially more appropriate than in the field. This appears inconsistent with the hypo...
Can gender-balanced social norms mitigate the gender differences in competitiveness that are obse... more Can gender-balanced social norms mitigate the gender differences in competitiveness that are observed in traditional patriarchic as well as in modern societies? We experimentally assess men's and women's preferences to compete in a traditional society where women and men have similar rights and entitlements alongside a patriarchic and a matrilineal society which have previously been studied. We find that, unlike in the patriarchic society, there is no significant gender difference in the inclination to compete in the gender-balanced society. We also find that women's decisions in our experiment are optimal more often than men's in the gender-balanced society - opposite to the pattern encountered in the patriarchic society. Our results highlight the importance of culture and socialization for gender differences in competitiveness and suggest that the large gender-differences in competitiveness documented for modern societies are a long-term consequence of a patriarchi...
We study the relationship between social norms governing women’s status in society and gender dif... more We study the relationship between social norms governing women’s status in society and gender differences in competitiveness. We conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment eliciting men’s and women’s inclinations to compete among three traditional societies with markedly different social norms, one patriarchic, one genderbalanced and one close to matriarchic. We find that the male-female gender difference in the inclination to compete increases monotonically with the degree of patriarchy. We also find that men make optimal decisions more often than women only in the patriarchic society while women’s decisions are most superior to men’s in the gender-balanced society. We can rule out gender differences in risk preferences as a driver of these results. We conclude that gender-balanced social norms rather than norms favoring women asymmetrically suffice to unleash women’s economic potential relative to men’s. JEL Classifications: C93, D81, J15, J16.
Can gender-balanced social norms mitigate the gender gap in competitiveness that has been documen... more Can gender-balanced social norms mitigate the gender gap in competitiveness that has been documented for modern as well as traditional patriarchic societies? We identify a society in northeast India where women and men have had similar rights and entitlements from time immemorial, to conduct the first lab-in-the-field experiment in a traditional society with gender-balanced norms. For reference we conduct the same competition experiments in adjoining traditional patriarchic and matrilineal societies. We find no significant gender difference in the inclination to compete in the gender-balanced society – unlike in the patriarchic society. We also find that women’s decisions in our experiment are payoff-maximizing more often than men’s in the gender-balanced society – opposite to the pattern encountered in the patriarchic society. Our results highlight the long-term effects of culture on economic behavior and indicate that the large gender gap in competitiveness documented for modern societies is a long-term consequence of their patriarchic foretime.
Abstract Evidence from public goods game experiments holds the promise of informing climate chang... more Abstract Evidence from public goods game experiments holds the promise of informing climate change policies. To fulfill this promise, such evidence needs to demonstrate generalizability to this specific policy context. This paper examines whether and under which conditions behavior in public goods games generalizes to decisions about voluntary climate actions. We observe each participant in two different decision tasks: a real giving task in which contributions are used to directly reduce CO2 emissions and an abstract public goods game. Through treatment variations in this within-subjects design, we explore two factors that are candidates for affecting generalizability: the structural resemblance of contribution incentives between the tasks and the role of the subject pool, students and non-students. Our findings suggest that cooperation in public goods games is only weakly linked to voluntary climate actions and not in a uniform way. For a standard set of parameters, behavior in both tasks is uncorrelated. Greater structural resemblance of the public goods game with the context of climate change mitigation produces more sizable correlations, especially for student subjects.
Even though chronic stress is a pervasive problem in contemporary societies and is known to poten... more Even though chronic stress is a pervasive problem in contemporary societies and is known to potentially precede both adverse psychological as well as physiological conditions, its effects on decision making have not been systematically investigated. In this paper, we focus on the relation between self-reported chronic stress and self-reported as well as behaviorally shown social preferences. We measured chronic stress with the Trier Inventory for Chronic Stress. To determine social preferences, participants played a double anonymous dictator game. In order to control for the robustness of social preferences we employed a 2x2x2x2 design where we manipulated four variables: the frame (Give to Recipient vs. Take from Recipient), the decision maker's gender (Female vs. Male), the recipient's gender (Female vs. Male), and the nature of the reward (Real vs. Hypothetical). Results show that perceived chronic stress is not significantly related to social preferences in monetarily re...
Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Negative evaluation processes play a pivotal role in the development an... more BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Negative evaluation processes play a pivotal role in the development and maintenance of depressive symptoms. However, it remains to be understood, whether evaluation processes in depression are impaired by maladaptive goal setting. METHOD In a non-clinical sample (N = 50) of individuals with high (BDI-II-Score: 13-29) and low (BDI-II-Score: 0-3) levels of depressive symptoms goal setting prior to working on a cognitive task was measured. Goal feasibility was experimentally manipulated using an easy and a difficult version of the task. RESULTS When goal feasibility was low, a high level of depressive symptoms was associated with setting unattainable goals. Whereas individuals with low level of depressive symptoms adjusted their goals to a lower (more realistic) level when task difficulty increased, individuals with high level of depressive symptoms initially adhered to significantly higher goals, so that their performance failed to meet their self-set standards. After depressed individual revised their goals downwards, their subsequent performance on the task also worsened. LIMITATIONS The use of a non-clinical sample with self-reported depressive symptoms limits the generalizability of our findings to a clinical population. Future research would benefit from the use of a larger sample with patients suffering from clinical depression. CONCLUSIONS The findings support the notion that negative evaluation processes in depressed individuals might be linked with their tendency to generate intractable conflicts between self-set inappropriate high goals and their own capacities to perform. However, the findings need to be confirmed in clinical samples to draw conclusions about the role of goal setting in negative evaluation processes in depression.
While preferences for conformity are commonly seen as an important driver of pro-social behaviour... more While preferences for conformity are commonly seen as an important driver of pro-social behaviour, only a small set of previous studies has explicitly tested the behavioural mechanisms underlying this proposition. In this paper, we report on two interconnected experimental studies that jointly provide a more thorough and robust understanding of a causal mechanism that links social information (i.e., information about the generosity of others) to donations via changing the perception of a descriptive social norm. In a modified dictator game, Experiment 1 re-investigates this mechanism adding further robustness to prior results by eliciting choices from a non-student sample and by implementing an additional treatment that controls for potential anchoring effects implied by the methods used in previous investigations. Experiment 2 adds further robustness by investigating the link between social information, (descriptive) norm perception and giving at the individual, rather than the gro...
Depression in the workplace is a significant factor for reduced personal well-being and productiv... more Depression in the workplace is a significant factor for reduced personal well-being and productivity. Consequently, this has negative effects on the economic success of the companies in which depressed people are employed. In addition, the economy has to deal with the significant burden of this illness on the health system. In this paper, we investigated how different working contexts—working in a group or individually—influenced depressed individuals towards higher or lower well-being and productivity. We examined this using a laboratory experiment. In this setting, we were also able to analyze how, in turn, a depressive individual impacted the productivity and affective situation of their workgroup, reflecting the company perspective. The experimental design mimicked the very basic processes of a workplace in a stylized way. We used two distinct samples: subclinically and clinically depressed, both working in a group with healthy controls. As expected, we found generally lower per...
Mexico has one of the largest overweight and obesity epidemics in the world and as a response, se... more Mexico has one of the largest overweight and obesity epidemics in the world and as a response, several actions aiming to reduce the obesity epidemic have been already set in place. Some of these actions include a specific action program for schools looking to turn the scholar environments into supportive environments for the infants to make healthier food choices. The influence of the environment (the so-called “choice architecture”) on people’s perceptions and decisions is studied by economists with the aim of supporting individuals’ to make healthier decisions, using tools known as “nudges”. However, "nudges" are not commonly integrated into anti-obesity strategies. We designed an intervention trying to find out whether such a small, liberty-preserving intervention could increase the effectiveness of a water-promotion campaign, when compared to the common approach of an educative talk. The intervention was developed in three schools in Mexico City and the State of Mexico...
Growing interest in using personality variables in economic research has led to the question whet... more Growing interest in using personality variables in economic research has led to the question whether personality as measured by psychology is useful to predict economic behavior. It is undoubted that personality can influence large-scale economic outcomes. Whether personality variables can also be used to understand micro-behavior in economic games is, however, less clear. We discuss the reasons for and against this assumption. In the framework of our own experiment, we test whether and which personality factors are useful in predicting behavior in the Trust Game. We can also use the Trust Game to understand how personality measures fare relatively in predicting behavior when situational constraints are strong or weak. This approach can help economists to better understand what to expect from the inclusion of personality variables in their models and experiments, and where further research might be useful and needed.
Imitation has been shown to be an important heuristic, in particular in relatively complex enviro... more Imitation has been shown to be an important heuristic, in particular in relatively complex environments. In this experiment we test whether subjects are more likely to use imitation if they are under time pressure or distracted. Subjects play a repeated Cournot oligopoly. Treatments are time pressure within the task and distractions through a second task (a Stroop-task) that has to be performed as well and influences payment. We additionally measure stress levels through salivary cortisol and heart rate. Our main findings are that time pressure and distraction can raise physiological stress levels of subjects within our task. More importantly from an economic perspective, we can also observe a corresponding behavioral change that is indicative of imitation.
Even though chronic stress is a pervasive problem in contemporary societies and is known to poten... more Even though chronic stress is a pervasive problem in contemporary societies and is known to potentially precede both adverse psychological as well as physiological conditions, its effects on decision making have not been systematically investigated. In this paper, we focus on the relation between self-reported chronic stress and self-reported as well as behaviorally shown social preferences. We measured chronic stress with the Trier Inventory for Chronic Stress [1, 2]. To determine social preferences, participants played a double anonymous dictator game. In order to control for the robustness of social preferences we employed a 2x2x2x2 design where we manipulated four variables: the frame (Give to Recipient vs. Take from Recipient), the decision maker’s gender (Female vs. Male), the recipient’s gender (Female vs. Male), and the nature of the reward (Real vs. Hypothetical). Results show that perceived chronic stress is not significantly related to social preferences in monetarily rew...
Evidence from public goods game experiments holds the promise of informing climate change policie... more Evidence from public goods game experiments holds the promise of informing climate change policies. To fulfill this promise, such evidence needs to demonstrate generalizability to this specific policy context. This paper examines whether and under which conditions behavior in public goods games generalizes to decisions about voluntary climate actions. We observe each participant in two different decision tasks: a real giving task in which contributions are used to directly reduce CO2 emissions and an abstract public goods game. Through treatment variations in this within-subjects design, we explore two factors that are candidates for affecting generalizability: the structural resemblance of contribution incentives between the tasks and the role of the subject pool, students and non-students. Our findings suggest that cooperation in public goods games is only weakly linked to voluntary climate actions and not in a uniform way. For a standard set of parameters, behavior in both tasks ...
Many recent experimental studies have shown that some subjects destroy other subjects' income... more Many recent experimental studies have shown that some subjects destroy other subjects' incomes without receiving any material benefit, and that they even incur costs to do so. In this paper, we study the boundary conditions of this phenomenon, which is referred to as anti-social behavior. We introduce a four-player destruction game, in which we vary the framing and the presence of another activity, running in parallel to the destruction game. We observe a substantial amount of destruction in the baseline condition without the parallel activity, and with a framing in the spirit of previous destruction experiments. Our results indicate that a parallel activity as well as a framing emphasizing joint ownership of the item that can be destroyed reduces destruction almost to zero. We therefore argue that the emergence of anti-social behavior is highly contingent on the contextual environment.
We study whether social norm perception in economic laboratory experiments differs between subjec... more We study whether social norm perception in economic laboratory experiments differs between subjects that participate for the first time and subjects that already participated many times. Consistent with previous studies, inexperienced subjects pronounce egalitarianism, while experienced subjects pronounce efficiency and the maximization of their own earnings. Moreover, experienced subjects evaluate exploitation and deception of other individuals in the lab as more appropriate than inexperienced subjects. Field norms also slightly differ between the two groups, but to a lower extent than lab norms. We therefore conclude that learning effects are more important than selection effects for explaining differences between inexperienced and experienced participants. We also conduct exploratory analyses on the relation between lab and field norms and find that behaving unsocial in the lab is considered substantially more appropriate than in the field. This appears inconsistent with the hypo...
Can gender-balanced social norms mitigate the gender differences in competitiveness that are obse... more Can gender-balanced social norms mitigate the gender differences in competitiveness that are observed in traditional patriarchic as well as in modern societies? We experimentally assess men's and women's preferences to compete in a traditional society where women and men have similar rights and entitlements alongside a patriarchic and a matrilineal society which have previously been studied. We find that, unlike in the patriarchic society, there is no significant gender difference in the inclination to compete in the gender-balanced society. We also find that women's decisions in our experiment are optimal more often than men's in the gender-balanced society - opposite to the pattern encountered in the patriarchic society. Our results highlight the importance of culture and socialization for gender differences in competitiveness and suggest that the large gender-differences in competitiveness documented for modern societies are a long-term consequence of a patriarchi...
We study the relationship between social norms governing women’s status in society and gender dif... more We study the relationship between social norms governing women’s status in society and gender differences in competitiveness. We conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment eliciting men’s and women’s inclinations to compete among three traditional societies with markedly different social norms, one patriarchic, one genderbalanced and one close to matriarchic. We find that the male-female gender difference in the inclination to compete increases monotonically with the degree of patriarchy. We also find that men make optimal decisions more often than women only in the patriarchic society while women’s decisions are most superior to men’s in the gender-balanced society. We can rule out gender differences in risk preferences as a driver of these results. We conclude that gender-balanced social norms rather than norms favoring women asymmetrically suffice to unleash women’s economic potential relative to men’s. JEL Classifications: C93, D81, J15, J16.
Can gender-balanced social norms mitigate the gender gap in competitiveness that has been documen... more Can gender-balanced social norms mitigate the gender gap in competitiveness that has been documented for modern as well as traditional patriarchic societies? We identify a society in northeast India where women and men have had similar rights and entitlements from time immemorial, to conduct the first lab-in-the-field experiment in a traditional society with gender-balanced norms. For reference we conduct the same competition experiments in adjoining traditional patriarchic and matrilineal societies. We find no significant gender difference in the inclination to compete in the gender-balanced society – unlike in the patriarchic society. We also find that women’s decisions in our experiment are payoff-maximizing more often than men’s in the gender-balanced society – opposite to the pattern encountered in the patriarchic society. Our results highlight the long-term effects of culture on economic behavior and indicate that the large gender gap in competitiveness documented for modern societies is a long-term consequence of their patriarchic foretime.
Abstract Evidence from public goods game experiments holds the promise of informing climate chang... more Abstract Evidence from public goods game experiments holds the promise of informing climate change policies. To fulfill this promise, such evidence needs to demonstrate generalizability to this specific policy context. This paper examines whether and under which conditions behavior in public goods games generalizes to decisions about voluntary climate actions. We observe each participant in two different decision tasks: a real giving task in which contributions are used to directly reduce CO2 emissions and an abstract public goods game. Through treatment variations in this within-subjects design, we explore two factors that are candidates for affecting generalizability: the structural resemblance of contribution incentives between the tasks and the role of the subject pool, students and non-students. Our findings suggest that cooperation in public goods games is only weakly linked to voluntary climate actions and not in a uniform way. For a standard set of parameters, behavior in both tasks is uncorrelated. Greater structural resemblance of the public goods game with the context of climate change mitigation produces more sizable correlations, especially for student subjects.
Even though chronic stress is a pervasive problem in contemporary societies and is known to poten... more Even though chronic stress is a pervasive problem in contemporary societies and is known to potentially precede both adverse psychological as well as physiological conditions, its effects on decision making have not been systematically investigated. In this paper, we focus on the relation between self-reported chronic stress and self-reported as well as behaviorally shown social preferences. We measured chronic stress with the Trier Inventory for Chronic Stress. To determine social preferences, participants played a double anonymous dictator game. In order to control for the robustness of social preferences we employed a 2x2x2x2 design where we manipulated four variables: the frame (Give to Recipient vs. Take from Recipient), the decision maker's gender (Female vs. Male), the recipient's gender (Female vs. Male), and the nature of the reward (Real vs. Hypothetical). Results show that perceived chronic stress is not significantly related to social preferences in monetarily re...
Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Negative evaluation processes play a pivotal role in the development an... more BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Negative evaluation processes play a pivotal role in the development and maintenance of depressive symptoms. However, it remains to be understood, whether evaluation processes in depression are impaired by maladaptive goal setting. METHOD In a non-clinical sample (N = 50) of individuals with high (BDI-II-Score: 13-29) and low (BDI-II-Score: 0-3) levels of depressive symptoms goal setting prior to working on a cognitive task was measured. Goal feasibility was experimentally manipulated using an easy and a difficult version of the task. RESULTS When goal feasibility was low, a high level of depressive symptoms was associated with setting unattainable goals. Whereas individuals with low level of depressive symptoms adjusted their goals to a lower (more realistic) level when task difficulty increased, individuals with high level of depressive symptoms initially adhered to significantly higher goals, so that their performance failed to meet their self-set standards. After depressed individual revised their goals downwards, their subsequent performance on the task also worsened. LIMITATIONS The use of a non-clinical sample with self-reported depressive symptoms limits the generalizability of our findings to a clinical population. Future research would benefit from the use of a larger sample with patients suffering from clinical depression. CONCLUSIONS The findings support the notion that negative evaluation processes in depressed individuals might be linked with their tendency to generate intractable conflicts between self-set inappropriate high goals and their own capacities to perform. However, the findings need to be confirmed in clinical samples to draw conclusions about the role of goal setting in negative evaluation processes in depression.
While preferences for conformity are commonly seen as an important driver of pro-social behaviour... more While preferences for conformity are commonly seen as an important driver of pro-social behaviour, only a small set of previous studies has explicitly tested the behavioural mechanisms underlying this proposition. In this paper, we report on two interconnected experimental studies that jointly provide a more thorough and robust understanding of a causal mechanism that links social information (i.e., information about the generosity of others) to donations via changing the perception of a descriptive social norm. In a modified dictator game, Experiment 1 re-investigates this mechanism adding further robustness to prior results by eliciting choices from a non-student sample and by implementing an additional treatment that controls for potential anchoring effects implied by the methods used in previous investigations. Experiment 2 adds further robustness by investigating the link between social information, (descriptive) norm perception and giving at the individual, rather than the gro...
Depression in the workplace is a significant factor for reduced personal well-being and productiv... more Depression in the workplace is a significant factor for reduced personal well-being and productivity. Consequently, this has negative effects on the economic success of the companies in which depressed people are employed. In addition, the economy has to deal with the significant burden of this illness on the health system. In this paper, we investigated how different working contexts—working in a group or individually—influenced depressed individuals towards higher or lower well-being and productivity. We examined this using a laboratory experiment. In this setting, we were also able to analyze how, in turn, a depressive individual impacted the productivity and affective situation of their workgroup, reflecting the company perspective. The experimental design mimicked the very basic processes of a workplace in a stylized way. We used two distinct samples: subclinically and clinically depressed, both working in a group with healthy controls. As expected, we found generally lower per...
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