 Reaping a benefit at the expense of multiple others: How are the losses of others counted?Meir Barneron, Shoham Choshen-Hillel and Ilan Yaniv Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2021, vol. 164, issue C, 136-146 Abstract: We investigate individual decisions that produce gains for oneself, while imposing losses on a group of others. We theorize, based on the notion of empathy, that decision-makers consider the magnitude of the pain or loss they inflict on an individual in the group, but are largely insensitive to the number of individuals in the group who suffer losses. Studies involving personal choices or judgments of others’ choices largely confirmed these predictions. They also revealed a dispersion effect, whereby participants made more selfish choices, and judged others’ selfish choices more lightly, when the social losses were dispersed more thinly across a group. It appears that decision-makers’ empathy for others who suffer losses is not readily adjusted to the number of people affected or to the aggregated losses. It also appears that empathy mediates judgments of selfish behavior. The findings are related to theories of empathy, and decisions under conflicts of interest. Keywords: Judgment and decision making; Selfish vs prosocial behavior; Empathy; Social preference; Conflict of interest; Decision ethics (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jobhdp:v:164:y:2021:i:c:p:136-146 DOI: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2021.02.004 Access Statistics for this article Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes is currently edited by John M. Schaubroeck More articles in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes from Elsevier |
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