Honestly, why are you donating money to charity? An experimental study about self-awareness in status-seeking behavior

Mitesh Kataria () and Tobias Regner

No 2012-032, Jena Economics Research Papers from Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena

Abstract: This study investigates experimentally whether people in retrospective are self-aware that they engage in status-seeking behavior. Subjects participated in a real-effort task where effort translated into a donation to a charity. Within-subjects we varied the visibility of their performance (private/public feedback). On average subjects exerted more effort in the public treatment. After the real effort task subjects were asked to state their retrospective beliefs about their performance in public given feedback about their performance in private, and about the performance of other subjects in public given the average performance in private. Between-subjects we varied the compensation (low/high) for accurate estimates. Our results show a lack of self-awareness about status-seeking behavior that is robust to increased belief compensation. We also found that subjects expected others to be as status-seeking as they are themselves or even less.

Keywords: Social status; self-image; self-awareness; self-deception; experiment; beliefs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D03 D84 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-07-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published as "Honestly, why are you donating money to charity? An experimental study about self-awareness in status-seeking behavior", in: Theory and Decision 79/3 (2015), 493-515.

Downloads: (external link)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11238-014-9469-5 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Honestly, why are you donating money to charity? An experimental study about self-awareness in status-seeking behavior (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jrp:jrpwrp:2012-032

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Jena Economics Research Papers from Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Markus Pasche ().