Facing expectations: Those that we prefer to fulfil and those that we disregard
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2015, Vol 10, Issue 5
Abstract
We argue that people choosing prosocial distribution of goods (e.g., in dictator games) make this choice because they do not want to disappoint their partner rather than because of a direct preference for the chosen prosocial distribution. The chosen distribution is a means to fulfil one’s partner’s expectations. We review the economic experiments that corroborate this hypothesis and the experiments that deny that beliefs about others’ expectations motivate prosocial choice. We then formulate hypotheses about what types of expectation motivate someone to do what is expected: these are justifiable hopeful expectations that are clearly about his own choices. We experimentally investigate how people modulate their prosociality when they face low or unreasonably high expectations. In a version of a dictator game, we provide dictators with the opportunity to modulate their transfer as a function of their partner’s expectations. We observe that a significant portion of the population is willing to fulfil their partner’s expectation provided that this expectation expresses a reasonable hope. We conclude that people are averse to disappointing and we discuss what models of social preferences can account for the role of expectations in determining prosocial choice, with a special attention to models of guilt aversion and social esteem.
Authors and Affiliations
Facing expectations: Those that we prefer to fulfil and those that we disregard
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP678197
- DOI -
- Views 103
- Downloads 0
This way, please: Uncovering the directional effects of attribute translations on decision making
The translation of choice attributes into more meaningful information (e.g., from kWh to costs) is a form of choice architecture that is thought to facilitate decision making by providing decision signposts that activate...
Do Europeans like nudges?
In recent years, many governments have shown a keen interest in “nudges” — approaches to law and policy that maintain freedom of choice, but that steer people in certain directions. Yet to date, there has been little evi...
Less-is-more effects without the recognition heuristic
Inferences consistent with “recognition-based” decision-making may be drawn for various reasons other than recognition alone. We demonstrate that, for 2-alternative forced-choice decision tasks, less-is-more effects (red...
The availability heuristic in the classroom: How soliciting more criticism can boost your course ratings
This paper extends previous research showing that experienced difficulty of recall can influence evaluative judgments (e.g., Winkielman & Schwarz, 2001) to a field study of university students rating a course. Students c...
Can asymmetric subjective opportunity cost effect explain impatience in intertemporal choice? A replication study
In “The value of nothing: asymmetric attention to opportunity costs drives intertemporal decision making” Read, Olivola and Hardisty (2017) proposed an asymmetric subjective opportunity cost (ASOC) effect to explain and...