The social construction of ignorance: Experimental evidence
Ivan Soraperra,
Joël van der Weele,
Marie Claire Villeval and
Shaul Shalvi
Games and Economic Behavior, 2023, vol. 138, issue C, 197-213
Abstract:
We experimentally study the social transmission of “inconvenient” information about the externalities generated by one's own decision. In the laboratory, we pair uninformed decision makers with informed senders. Compared to a setting where subjects can choose their information directly, we find that social interactions increase selfish decisions. On the supply side, senders suppress almost 30 percent of “inconvenient” information, driven by their own preferences for information and their beliefs about the decision maker's preferences. On the demand side, about one-third of decision makers avoids senders who transmit inconvenient information (“shooting the messenger”), which leads to assortative matching between information-suppressing senders and information-avoiding decision makers. Having more control over information generates opposing effects on behavior: selfish decision makers remain ignorant more often and donate less, while altruistic decision makers seek out informative senders and give more. We discuss applications to information sharing in social networks and to organizational design.
Keywords: Social interactions; Information avoidance; Assortative matching; Ethical behavior; Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D82 D83 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825622001737
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
Working Paper: The Social Construction of Ignorance: Experimental Evidence (2023) 
Working Paper: The social construction of ignorance: Experimental evidence (2023) 
Working Paper: The Social Construction of Ignorance: Experimental Evidence (2022) 
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:eee:gamebe:v:138:y:2023:i:c:p:197-213
DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2022.12.002
Access Statistics for this article
Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai
More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().