In this paper, we compare behavior in the dictator, ultimatum, and public goods games before and during the Gezi Park protests in laboratory experiments conducted in Türkiye. In May 2013, protests began against the proposed destruction of Gezi Park—one of the few remaining green spaces in Istanbul’s city center—for the construction of a shopping mall. Quickly spreading across Türkiye, many ordinary citizens participated in the protests in the following weeks. The collective action demonstrated in these protests is similar to the types of behavior economists study in games where individuals accept personal costs for the benefit of others. We find that participants in the protests were just as likely to choose the equal payoff option as it increased in value in the modified dictator game, punish uncooperative behavior in the ultimatum game, and reward cooperative behavior in the public goods game as those who participated in the experiments before the protests. This was true of the behavior of the nonparticipants in the protests in the ultimatum and public goods games. In contrast, nonparticipants in the protests were less willing to forgo the selfish payoff option for their coplayer’s benefit in the modified dictator game.

The Inclusion of Other in the Self (IOS) scale is a popular tool to measure interpersonal closeness that is increasingly being used in economics. We develop and validate a continuous version of the IOS scale. This Continuous IOS scale gives a finer measure and addresses the reluctance of subjects to report low scores on the standard IOS scale. We also propose a version of the standard IOS scale that meets its original design features. Our IOS scales are easy-to-use, well-documented, standardised, and available at https://github.com/geoffreycastillo/ios-js.

We examine the role of cooperative preferences, beliefs, and punishments to uncover potential cross-societal differences in voluntary cooperation. Using one-shot public goods experiments in four comparable subject pools from the US and the UK (two similar Western societies) and Morocco and Turkey (two comparable non-Western societies), we find that cooperation is lower in Morocco and Turkey than in the UK and the US. Using the ABC approach--in which cooperative attitudes and beliefs explain cooperation--we show that cooperation is mostly driven by differences in beliefs rather than cooperative preferences or peer punishment, both of which are similar across the four subject pools. Our methodology is generalizable across subject pools and highlights the central role of beliefs in explaining differences in voluntary cooperation within and across culturally, economically, and institutionally diverse societies. Because our behavioral mechanisms correctly predict actual contributions, we argue that our approach provides a suitable methodology for analyzing the determinants of voluntary cooperation of any group of interest.

Social norms have long been recognized as an important factor in curtailing antisocial behavior, and stricter prosocial norms are commonly associated with increased prosocial behavior. In this study, we provide evidence that very strict prosocial norms can have a perverse negative relationship with prosocial behavior. In laboratory experiments conducted in 10 countries across 5 continents, we measured the level of honest behavior and elicited injunctive norms of honesty. We find that individuals who hold very strict norms (i.e., those who perceive a small lie to be as socially unacceptable as a large lie) are more likely to lie to the maximal extent possible. This finding is consistent with a simple behavioral rationale. If the perceived norm does not differentiate between the severity of a lie, lying to the full extent is optimal for a norm violator since it maximizes the financial gain, while the perceived costs of the norm violation are unchanged. We show that the relation between very strict prosocial norms and high levels of rule violations generalizes to civic norms related to common moral dilemmas, such as tax evasion, cheating on government benefits, and fare dodging on public transportation. Those with very strict attitudes toward civic norms are more likely to lie to the maximal extent possible. A similar relation holds across countries. Countries with a larger fraction of people with very strict attitudes toward civic norms have a higher society-level prevalence of rule violations.

This study examines how false memories are associated with individuals’ willingness to compete and subsequent performance. We develop a framework with stochastic manipulation and recall noise, which implies that negative recalled signals are relatively more informative about underlying ability than positive ones. We test the predictions in a two-stage experiment in which participants first answer English, logic, and math questions, and return three to four months later to recall their performance and choose between tournament and piece-rate compensation. We document that positive memory distortions are more prevalent than negative ones. Moreover, individuals with more positively biased memories are more likely to enter tournaments and tend to perform better, while those with more negatively biased memories are less likely to compete and perform worse. Consistent with the framework, negative false memories exhibit stronger associations with both choices and performance. These patterns are robust to controls for overconfidence, cognitive ability, and personality traits, and persist using alternative measures based on phantom questions, suggesting the role of memory distortions as a distinct factor in decisions.

Social discounting refers to the idea that decision-makers discount payoffs as a function of social distance. We introduce a method to measure social distance using interpersonal similarity; that is, how similar or different others are to the decision-maker. We use data from our own preregistered experiments as well from an existing, independently conducted, lab-in-the-field experiment to estimate the structural parameters of social discounting and find evidence for it. Our experiments control for competing explanations to isolate the effect of similarity and thus show that people have a preference for more similar others. Our estimates imply that in order for a decision-maker to willingly forgo $1 and have it instead benefit a dissimilar other, then it would need to increase to at least $1.25. We also find evidence for quasi-hyperbolic social discounting.

Social psychologists have long argued that persistently high rates of violence or anti-social behavior in the US South can be attributed to a so-called ‘culture of honor’. This culture requires an individual to stand up for himself using violence if necessary to protect his reputation. Within a social dilemma, these cultural differences in response to the cooperation and punishment behavior of others might lead to differences in social outcomes. In experiments using an innovative online platform, we find differences between Southerners and their counterparts with respect to the directionality of punishment in a social dilemma. These differences parallel the variation in effectiveness of punishment as a means of enhancing cooperation as well as the levels of anti-social punishment across societies.