LISS panel Grant 2023. Authors: Karlijn Hoyer, Lucas Molleman (Universiteit van Amsterdam – Faculteit der Maatschappij en Gedragswetenschappen).
For societies to adequately respond to pressing challenges like climate change, citizens need to follow behavioral rules, even when it involves personal sacrifices like reducing your carbon footprint. Rule violations are widespread, illustrating the need for a deeper understanding of when and why people follow rules. This project will examine the role of greed, the insatiable desire to acquire more. Greed is known to induce self-interested and unethical behavior, but does it also lead to rule violations, even when the benefits of violation are small? The first goal of this project is to experimentally test the effect of greed on rule-compliance in situations in which the gains of violation are high versus low. We test this using an incentivized experimental rule-following paradigm. Secondly, we aim to further typify rule-followers and rule-breakers, by correlating the measurements with a set of candidate personality traits and demographics previously measured in the LISS panel.
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