Self-control, expectations, and patience : essays on social decision making

Abstract

Essay 1: Self-Control and Altruism: The Moderating Role of Endowments. People exhibit a remarkable ability to cooperate with one another, to an extent that critically distinguishes human society from communities of other primate and animal species. Although altruism plays an essential role in sustaining cooperation among unrelated groups of individuals, little is known about the underlying psychological processes that drive altruistic behavior. While evidence supporting conflicting dual process accounts has appeared in the literature, here we offer an anchoring and adjustment account that clarifies the mechanistic relationship between self-control and the tendency towards altruism or selfishness. We find that participants depleted of self regulatory resources are highly biased by initial endowments and insufficiently adjust away from them when making transfer decisions. Thus, depending on the nature of the initial endowments, individuals may reveal either increased altruism or increased selfishness under self-regulatory depletion. Essay 2: Relative to Them: How Better Brands Reduce Product Efficacy. Across many domains, positive beliefs often lead to self-fulfilling positive outcomes. Here however, we find the opposite to be true. In a series of four studies, we observe that positive beliefs about products can lead to negative performance outcomes in using them when social comparison processes are activated. Although people appear to believe that high status branded products are of superior quality and are willing to pay more for them, these beliefs in fact lead people to evaluate their own expected performance relative to a higher standard of reference. Our findings suggest that when people contrast themselves to these higher reference points, they form negative expectations about their own performance that result in increased levels of intimidation and in turn, reduced product efficacy. Essay 3: Altruistic Patience: When Giving More Beats Giving Now. People are known to take into account the welfare of others when making decisions. Many of these settings also involve tradeoffs in the benefits that others receive at different points in time. For example, donors make decisions between giving to those in immediate need and funding longer-term projects, policy makers impact their constituents by responding to immediate concerns and also supporting larger efforts for reform, and even friends face the perennial gift-giving problem in picking either short lived novelties or necessities that will last. This work identifies a bias in the intertemporal choices that people make when the consequences of those choices are not directly experienced by the decision maker. In particular, I find that people appear to be more patient when conferring benefits to others rather than themselves and that this bias is driven by both relaxed time sensitivity and by diagnostic motivations.