Moti Michaeli (University of Haifa, visiting scholar at Collegio Carlo Alberto this year)

Seminar series “CLOSER, but not quite” – Disentangling Pro-sociality from Convictions

Venue: Campus Luigi Einaudi, room 3 D1 01

Abstract. In a recent project we let subjects play the Dictator Game (DG) and the Trust Game (TG) and correlated behavior in these games with vaccination decisions. We conjectured that choices in the DG and TG might reflect not only pro-sociality but also the strength of convictions. In other words, people have personal normative beliefs on the right thing to do (e.g. in DG), but acting upon these normative beliefs is costly. Thus, the actual choices made in the games reflect both these beliefs and the willingness to bear a cost to follow them (namely, the strength of convictions). We wish to test this conjecture and offer a setup for disentangling “pure” pro-sociality from the strength of convictions. Each “clean” measure may then be used to predict behavior in other contexts.