Cooperation creates special moral obligations

Alexander Cappelen, Varun Gauri and Bertil Tungodden

No 8531, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: A large-scale economic experiment, conducted on a representative sample of the US population, shows that cooperation creates special moral obligations. Participants in the experiment, acting as impartial spectators, transferred significantly more money to an unlucky worker when two individuals had cooperated than when they had worked independently. The authors further show that the effect of cooperation is strongly associated with political affiliation, with Democrats attaching significantly more importance to cooperation as a source of moral obligation than Republicans. The findings shed light on the foundations of redistributive preferences and may contribute to explain the often observed asymmetry in moral concern for different groups of individuals, both nationally and internationally.

Keywords: Judicial System Reform; Gender and Development; Inequality; Public Sector Management and Reform (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-07-13
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Related works:
Working Paper: Cooperation Creates Special Moral Obligations (2018)
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