The limited role of prosocial behavior in preventing others from being dishonest

IF 1.6 3区经济学 Q2 ECONOMICS

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics Pub Date : 2025-06-26 DOI:10.1016/j.socec.2025.102407

Štěpán Bahník, Petr Houdek, Marek Hudík, Nicolas Say

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Honest individuals can strategically assume positions of power to prevent dishonest individuals from taking these positions. We conducted a laboratory experiment where participants were given two versions of an incentivized prediction task, one of which allowed cheating. Cheating on the task led a charity to lose endowed money. By introducing an auction for a limited spot in the cheating-enabling version, we examined whether honest participants bid in the auction to prevent dishonest participants from cheating and thereby harming the charity. We found that such behavior was rare, with at most 2.2 % of participants engaging in it. Furthermore, the size of the charity loss and the presence of information about cheating of others did not affect bidding in the auction and cheating in the task. The participants willing to pay for the cheating-enabling version of the task did so primarily for their own gain. The prosocial preferences of honest individuals are not strong enough to prevent dishonest individuals from seizing positions of power, and only a few honest individuals are prepared to combat dishonesty actively.

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亲社会行为在防止他人不诚实中的有限作用

诚实的人可以战略性地担任权力职位，以防止不诚实的人获得这些职位。我们进行了一个实验室实验，给参与者两个版本的激励预测任务，其中一个允许作弊。在任务中作弊导致慈善机构损失了捐赠的资金。通过在允许作弊的版本中引入有限位置的拍卖，我们检查了诚实的参与者在拍卖中出价是否可以防止不诚实的参与者作弊，从而损害慈善事业。我们发现这种行为是罕见的，最多只有2.2%的参与者参与其中。此外，慈善损失的大小和关于他人作弊的信息的存在并不影响拍卖中的出价和任务中的作弊。参与者愿意为允许作弊的任务付费，主要是为了他们自己的利益。诚实个体的亲社会偏好不足以阻止不诚实个体获得权力，只有少数诚实个体准备积极地与不诚实行为作斗争。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

2.60

自引率

12.50%

发文量

113

审稿时长

83 days

期刊介绍： The Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly the Journal of Socio-Economics) welcomes submissions that deal with various economic topics but also involve issues that are related to other social sciences, especially psychology, or use experimental methods of inquiry. Thus, contributions in behavioral economics, experimental economics, economic psychology, and judgment and decision making are especially welcome. The journal is open to different research methodologies, as long as they are relevant to the topic and employed rigorously. Possible methodologies include, for example, experiments, surveys, empirical work, theoretical models, meta-analyses, case studies, and simulation-based analyses. Literature reviews that integrate findings from many studies are also welcome, but they should synthesize the literature in a useful manner and provide substantial contribution beyond what the reader could get by simply reading the abstracts of the cited papers. In empirical work, it is important that the results are not only statistically significant but also economically significant. A high contribution-to-length ratio is expected from published articles and therefore papers should not be unnecessarily long, and short articles are welcome. Articles should be written in a manner that is intelligible to our generalist readership. Book reviews are generally solicited but occasionally unsolicited reviews will also be published. Contact the Book Review Editor for related inquiries.