Don't patronize me! An Experiment on Rejecting Paternalistic Help
Silvia Lübbecke (silvia.luebbecke@upb.de) and
Wendelin Schnedler
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Silvia Lübbecke: University of Paderborn
No 34, Working Papers Dissertations from Paderborn University, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics
Abstract:
Children sometimes reject help that they have not asked for only to do the work themselves. Here, we study whether adults also reject such paternalistic help and distinguish between three possible reasons. The person rejecting help may want to preserve her self-esteem, signal her autonomy or signal her cognitive competence to the interfering party (paternalist). By varying the information available to the paternalist, we can isolate these three effects. If all three effects can operate, a substantial fraction rejects paternalistic help. Excluding the opportunity to signal cognitive competence or autonomy to the paternalist through rejection leads to a sizable (but not statistically significant) reduction of rejections.
Keywords: self-esteem; image concerns; autonomy; cognitive competence; paternalism; self-determination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D82 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2018-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe and nep-exp
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http://groups.uni-paderborn.de/wp-wiwi/RePEc/pdf/dispap/DP34.pdf (application/pdf)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pdn:dispap:34
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