Chen Yefeng, Pan Yiwen, Cui Haohan, Yang Xiaolan
School of Economics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China.
Interdisciplinary Center for Social Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China.
Behav Sci (Basel). 2023 Feb 14;13(2):172. doi: 10.3390/bs13020172.
Unethical behavior is discovered that is more contagious than ethical behavior. This article attempts to propose one of the possible underlying mechanisms-people may have underconfidence bias in information updating due to motivated reasoning, and such bias exhibits in a different direction compared to the overconfident bias documented in the literature on ethical environment, which generate the asymmetric pattern in contagion. This study designs an experiment which relates the unethical behavior to social learning, where a series of subjects with private information about penalty decide sequentially whether to conduct unethical behavior publicly. This study adopts a quantal response equilibrium to construct a structural model for estimation of the bias. In total, 162 university students participated in our experiment and the results confirm the asymmetric patterns that people rely more on others' precedent decisions rather than their private signal; therefore, the bias facilitates the contagion. This study also tests two punishment systems in the experiment and the results suggest a policy: slightly increasing penalties for the "followers" in the early stages would effectively suppress the contagion.
研究发现不道德行为比道德行为更具传染性。本文试图提出一种可能的潜在机制——由于动机性推理，人们在信息更新时可能存在信心不足偏差，且这种偏差与道德环境文献中记载的过度自信偏差呈现不同方向，从而产生了传染的不对称模式。本研究设计了一个将不道德行为与社会学习相关联的实验，一系列掌握惩罚相关私人信息的受试者依次决定是否公开做出不道德行为。本研究采用量子反应均衡来构建一个用于估计偏差的结构模型。共有162名大学生参与了我们的实验，结果证实了人们更多地依赖他人的先例决策而非自身私人信号这一不对称模式；因此，这种偏差助长了传染。本研究还在实验中测试了两种惩罚系统，结果表明一项政策：在早期阶段对“追随者”轻微加重处罚将有效抑制传染。
