Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Can priming cooperation increase public good contributions?

  • Published:
Theory and Decision Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

We investigate the effect of priming on pro-social behaviour in a setting where there is a clear financial incentive to free ride. By activating the concept of cooperation among randomly selected individuals, we explore whether it is possible to positively influence people’s voluntary contributions to the public good. Our findings indicate that cooperative priming increases contributions in a one-shot public goods game from approximately 25–36 % compared with the non-primed group. The results call for further explorations of the role of priming in economic behaviours in general.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. For a conceptual discussion and classification of framing effects, see Levin et al. (1998).

  2. It is important to note that our priming intervention can be criticized as being potentially an experimenter demand effect (Zizzo 2010). To control for this possibility, in a post-experimental questionnaire we asked subjects to indicate whether they think their decisions in our experiment were affected by our priming task. We discuss how we controlled econometrically for such an effect in Sect. 3.

  3. We include the \(16\times 16\) matrix of the actual word-search puzzle used in the experiment in online Appendix B in supplementary material.

  4. In each treatment, subjects were asked at the end of the game to indicate the intensity of emotions they felt about the actual contribution behaviour of each member of their group. The procedure we used to elicit self-reports on perceived emotions is due to Bosman and Winden (2002). In particular, subjects were given a list of thirteen emotions, and were then asked to indicate the intensity with which they felt each emotion when they saw the contribution of each other group member. The intensity for each emotion was recorded on a 7-point scale (1 \(=\) “not at all”, ..., 7 \(=\) “very much”). In order to exclude potential income effects, which may confound the elicitation of emotions, elicitation of beliefs was not incentivized. However, since our primary focus is on how priming affects pro-social behaviours in a public good game, we have decided not to use data from the emotions’ elicitation in the paper.

  5. The variable “Other nationalities” is equal to 1 for those subjects who reported their nationality as being outside the UK and the EU, and 0 otherwise.

  6. The differences in the conditional marginal effects of priming on beliefs about other people’s contributions are also statistically insignificant across different personal characteristics; see online Appendix D in supplementary material.

  7. In a post-experimental questionnaire we asked subjects the following question: “Do you think the first experiment has affected your decisions in the second experiment?”. This would allow us to control for potential experimenter demand effects that might emerge from the use of our priming intervention. None of the subjects in the non-priming treatment and 16 out of 75 subjects in the priming treatment answered this question positively. When we include a dummy variable controlling for those who reported that the priming task affected their subsequent behaviour, the estimated coefficient on the variable “Priming” remains statistically significant for the regressions of contributions (Models 1, 2 and 3) and statistically insignificant for the regressions of beliefs about others’ contributions (Models 4, 5 and 6). Notice that the coefficient of the variable (“Understanding the experiment”) capturing whether subjects’ behaviour had been affected by our priming task is insignificant in all our econometric models. We report our regression models in Appendix E in supplementary material.

References

  • Ai, C., & Norton, E. C. (2003). Interaction terms in logit and probit models. Economics Letters, 80(1), 123–129.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ariely, D., Loewenstein, G., & Prelec, D. (2003). Coherent arbitrariness: Stable demand curves without stable preferences. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118, 73–105.

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Atlas, S., & Putterman, L. (2011). Trust among the Avatars: A virtual world experiment, with and without textual and visual cues. Southern Economic Journal, 78, 63–86.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bargh, J. A. (1989). Conditional automaticity: Varieties of automatic influence in social perception and cognition. In J. S. Uleman & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), Unintended thought (pp. 3–51). New York: Guilford.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bargh, J. A. (2006). What have we been priming all these years? On the development, mechanisms, and ecology of nonconscious social behavior. European Journal of Social Psychology, 36, 147–168.

    Article  PubMed Central  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Bargh, J. A., Gollwitzer, P., Lee-Chai, A., Barndollar, K., & Trötschel, R. (2001). The Automated will: Nonconscious activation and pursuit of behavioral goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 1014–1027.

    Article  PubMed Central  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Bargh, J. A., & Ferguson, M. J. (2000). Beyond behaviorism: On the automaticity of higher mental processes. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 925–945.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Bargh, J. A., & Morsella, E. (2008). The unconscious mind. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3, 73–79.

    Article  PubMed Central  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Benjamin, D. J., Choi, J. J., & Strickland, A. J. (2010a). Social identity and preferences. American Economic Review, 100, 1913–1928.

    Article  PubMed Central  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Benjamin, D. J., Choi, J. J., & G. W. Fisher. (2010b). Religious identity and economic behavior. NBER Working Paper No. 15925. Retrieved from http://www.nber.org/papers/w15925

  • Bochet, O., Page, T., & Putterman, L. (2006). Communication and punishment in voluntary contribution experiments. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 60, 11–26.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bolton, G., & Ockenfels, A. (2000). ERC: A theory of equity, reciprocity, and competition. American Economic Review, 90, 166–193.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bosman, R., & van Winden, F. (2002). Emotional hazard in a power-to-take experiment. Economic Journal, 112, 147–169.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cappelen, A. W., Drange Hole, A., Sørensen, E. Ø., & Tungodden, B. (2011). The importance of moral reflection and self-reported data in a dictator game with production. Social Choice and Welfare, 36, 105–120.

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Chaudhuri, A. (2011). Sustaining cooperation in laboratory public goods experiments: a selective survey of the literature. Experimental Economics, 14, 47–83.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dijksterhuis, A., & Bargh, J. A. (2001). The perception-behavior expressway: Automatic effects of social perception on social behavior. In M. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (pp. 1–40). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dolan, P., Hallsworth, M., Halpern, D., King, D., Metcalfe, R., & Vlaev, I. (2012). Influencing behavior: The mindspace way. Journal of Economic Psychology, 33, 264–277.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Drichoutis, A. (2011). Interpreting interaction terms in linear and non-linear models: a cautionary tale. Munich Personal RePEc Archive Working Paper#33251.

  • Fehr, E., & Gächter, S. (2000). Cooperation and punishment in public goods experiments. American Economic Review, 90, 980–994.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fehr, E., & Gächter, S. (2002). Altruistic punishment in humans. Nature, 415, 137–140.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  ADS  Google Scholar 

  • Fehr, E., & Schmidt, K. (1999). A theory of fairness, competition and cooperation. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 114, 817–868.

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Fischbacher, U. (2007). z-Tree: Zurich toolbox for ready-made economic experiments. Experimental Economics, 10, 171–178.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fischbacher, U., Gächter, S., & Fehr, E. (2001). Are people conditionally cooperative? Evidence from a public goods experiment. Economics Letters, 71, 397–404.

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Gächter, S., & Herrmann, B. (2009). Reciprocity, culture and human cooperation: Previous insights and a new cultural experiment. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B—Biological Sciences, 364, 761–806.

    Google Scholar 

  • Greiner, B. (2004). An online recruitment system for economic experiments. In Kurt Kremer & Volker Macho (Eds.), Forschung und wissenschaftliches Rechnen 2003, GWDG Bericht 63 (pp. 79–93). Göttingen: Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung.

    Google Scholar 

  • Güth, W., Levati, M. V., Sutter, M., & Van der Heijden, E. (2007). Leading by example with and without exclusion power in voluntary contribution experiments. Journal of Public Economics, 91, 1023–1042.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hertel, G., & Fiedler, K. (1998). Fair and dependent versus egoistic and free: Effects of semantic and evaluative priming on the ‘ring measure of social values’. European Journal of Social Psychology, 28, 49–70.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Isaac, M., & Walker, J. M. (1988). Communication and free-riding behavior: The voluntary contribution mechanism. Economic Inquiry, 26, 585–608.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. London, New York: Penguin Book Ltd.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kolb, W., & Wishaw, I. Q. (2009). Fundamentals of human neuropsychology (6th ed.). USA: Worth Publisher.

    Google Scholar 

  • LaBerge, D., & Buchsbaum, M. S. (1990). Positron emission tomographic measurements of pulvinar activity during an attention task. The Journal of Neuroscience, 10, 613–619.

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Ledyard, J. O. (1995). Public goods: A survey of experimental research. In A. E. Roth & J. H. Kagel (Eds.), The Handbook of Experimental Economics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Levati, M. V., Sutter, M., & Van der Heijden, E. (2007). Leading by example in a public goods experiment with heterogeneity and incomplete information. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 51, 793–818.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Levin, I. P., Schneider, S. L., & Gaeth, G. J. (1998). All frames are not created equal: A typology and critical analysis of framing effects. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 76, 149–188.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Liberman, Varda, Samuels, Steven, & Ross, Lee. (2004). The name of the game: Predictive power of reputations vs. situational labels in determining prisoner’s dilemma game moves. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30, 1175–1185.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • McKay, R., Efferson, C., Whitehouse, H., & Fehr, E. (2010). Wrath of God: religious primes and punishment. Proceedings of the Royal Society B—Biological Sciences, 278, 1858–1863.

    Article  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Ross, L., & Ward, A. (1996). Naive realism in everyday life: Implications for social conflict and misunderstanding. In Edward S. Reed, Elliott Turiel, & Terrence Brown (Eds.), Values and knowledge (pp. 103–135). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sefton, M., Shupp, R., & Walker, J. M. (2007). The effects of rewards and sanctions in provision of public goods. Economic Inquiry, 45, 679–690.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Strack, F., & Deutsch, R. (2004). Reflective and impulsive determinants of social behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8, 220–247.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Sutter, M., Haigner, S., & Kocher, M. (2010). Choosing the carrot or the stick?—Endogenous institutional choice in social dilemma situations. Review of Economic Studies, 77, 1540–1566.

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Zizzo, D. J. (2010). Experimenter demand effects in economic experiments. Experimental Economics, 13, 75–98.

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Arno Riedl, two anonymous reviewers, Vincent Crawford, Rachel Croson, Paul Dolan, John Hey, Andrew Oswald and Ivo Vlaev for their comments. Financial support from the University of York is gratefully acknowledged.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK

    Michalis Drouvelis

  2. University of Chicago, Chicago, USA

    Robert Metcalfe

  3. CEP, London School of Economics and Political Science, MIAESR, University of Melbourne, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK

    Nattavudh Powdthavee

Authors
  1. Michalis Drouvelis
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Robert Metcalfe
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Nattavudh Powdthavee
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nattavudh Powdthavee.

Electronic supplementary material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Supplementary material 1 (docx 104 KB)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Drouvelis, M., Metcalfe, R. & Powdthavee, N. Can priming cooperation increase public good contributions?. Theory Decis 79, 479–492 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11238-015-9481-4

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11238-015-9481-4

Keywords

Search

Navigation