Self-Image and Strategic Ignorance in Moral Dilemmas

Zachary Grossman and Joël van der Weele

University of California at Santa Barbara, Economics Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC Santa Barbara

Abstract: Avoiding information about adverse welfare consequences of self-interested decisions, orstrategic ignorance, is an important source of corruption, anti-social behavior and even atrocities. We model an agent who cares about self-image and has the opportunity to learn the social benefits of a personally costly action. The trade-off between self-image concerns and material payoffs can lead the agent to use ignorance as an excuse, even if it is deliberately chosen. Two experiments, modeled after Dana, Weber, and Kuang (2007), show that a) many people will reveal relevant information about others' payoffs after making an ethical decision, but not before, and b) some people are willing to pay for ignorance. These results corroborate the idea that Bayesian self-signaling drives people to avoid inconvenient facts in moral decisions.

Keywords: Social and Behavioral Sciences; prosocial behavior; dictator games; strategic ignorance; self-signaling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-03-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cta, nep-cwa, nep-exp, nep-mic and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

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