Persuasion, justification and the communication of social impact

Manuel Foerster and Joel (J.J.) van der Weele ()
Additional contact information
Joel (J.J.) van der Weele: Universiteit van Amsterdam

No 18-067/I, Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute

Abstract: We experimentally investigate strategic communication about the impact of prosocial actions, which is central to policy debates about foreign aid or the environment. In our experiment, a “sender” receives an informative but noisy signal about the impact of a charitable donation. She then sends a message to a “receiver”, upon which both subjects choose whether to donate. The sender faces a trade-off between persuading the receiver to act and justifying her own inaction. We find evidence for both motives. Increasing the visibility of the sender’s actions increases the justification motive and makes senders more likely to report low impact, reducing giving among receivers. These results show the intimate links between reputation and com- munication in moral domains, and help understand the fraught nature of political discussions about social impact.

Keywords: cheap talk; image concerns; information aggregation; charitable giving; economic experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D83 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-08-26
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.tinbergen.nl/18067.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:tin:wpaper:20180067

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tinbergen Office +31 (0)10-4088900 ().