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

Mitesh Kataria () and Tobias Regner

Theory and Decision, 2015, vol. 79, issue 3, 493-515

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 that participants would receive for providing accurate performance 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. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Keywords: Social status; Self-image; Self-awareness; Self-deception; Experiment; Beliefs; A13; D12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Working Paper: Honestly, why are you donating money to charity? An experimental study about self-awareness in status-seeking behavior (2012)
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DOI: 10.1007/s11238-014-9469-5

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