Norms' violation has relevant economic implication, tax evasion being one of the most important examples. As it is difficult by using field data to disentangle the mechanism that allowed unethical behaviors to spread in contemporary societies, the present research project aim at exploring this phenomenon through laboratory experiments. In particular, the experimental analysis tests how social status affects unethical behavior and its the spread of norms' violation through the observation of other people behavior.
In order to introduce unethical behavior in the laboratory, the subjects perform a standard dice task (Fischbacher and Follmi, 2013). Social identity is experimentally manipulated: in the control treatment people are randomly assigned to a generic Blue or Red group to create the feeling of membership to groups without any status difference between them. In the other treatments people are randomly assigned to an High or Low status group (Zizzo and Tsutsui, 2014). The dice task is performed first in isolation, and with social interaction, that is, knowing the average reporting of their group or of the other group (Diekmann et al., 2015). The experimental analysis aims at evaluating subjects' change in cheating behavior when others' cheating behavior is observed. The prediction is that social status strongly affects the reaction to observing the cheating behavior of in- and out-group members. In particular, when generic membership to a group is assigned, people conform to unethical behavior of in-group members, and do not conform to that of out-group members (Gino et al. 2009);the main prediction is that when social status is assigned, people conform not only to the behavior of in- group member, but also the to the behavior of out-group members with an higher social status. Finally, the work also aims at methodologically improving the status manipulation in experiments proposing a new procedure.
Norms' violation has relevant socio-economic consequences; for this reason, it has been for a long time an important research topic in experimental social psychology and, more recently, in experimental economics. However, data taken from the field often do not allow for a deep analysis of the role of the social environment in the individual decisions to break the rule. Empirical analyses incurs in fact in the reflection problem (Manski, 1993), that is, the issues related to the identification of endogenous social effects from the exogenous ones. In the case of tax evasion, for example, the propensity of an individual to evade may vary according to the behavior of the group because of social conformity and social learning effects, that the is purely endogenous since it is due to the interaction among people. However, the behavior in an environment where there is social interaction, may not depend on the interaction iteself, but may be due to exogenous characteristics of the group members not depending on the interaction. Further, correlated outcomes need not arise from interdependent behavior, but instead the group may behave similarly because they have similar unobserved characteristics, or face similar institutional environments (correlated effects). The experimental analysis has the advantage of controlling for exogenous characteristics and correlated effects, so that the pure endogenous effect of social interaction can be identified, and its arising and dynamics be deepen. The present research project aims to explore the effect of social interaction in norm violation in a social environment where status differences are introduced with status manipulation. The effect of a social environment with status differences has been tested experimentally in various task, e.g., trust games (Tsutsui and Zizzo, 2014), coordination games (Eckel and Wilson, 2007) and market outcomes (Ball et al., 2001), but not in a cheating task. This investigation of the effect of social status on cheating is particularly important since transmission and compliance with norms has been shown to be particularly sensitive to social identity and in particular to social status (Gino et al., 2009; Gil-White and Henrich 2001; Richerson and Boyd 2004). The project also aims to methodological improve the experimental procedure to manipulate status in the laboratory. In the minimal status some participants are randomly assigned to a group, and the other are not explicitly assigned to a group. The people not belonging to the group may feel a sentiment of exclusion and inferiority that determine a status difference between the group and no-group participants. However, these kind of minimal social identity manipulation may fail to let people feel entitled with the status. A more strong manipulation using public ceremony have been criticized because of a possible demand effect. Endogenous manipulation based on a self-selection in groups according to individual characteristics or on the performance imply to not randomize individual characteristics. In some treatments the minimal status manipulation will be used, but in others a new procedure will be tested before the cheating task: subjects are randomly assigned to generic different group. Then, they play a coordination game to strengthen the feeling of belonging to the group, and a feedback on the performance in the coordination game will be used in order to create a status difference. This procedure should combine the advantages of the entitlement with the status/group typical of endogenous manipulations and the randomization of individual characteristic as in exogenous manipulation. The group develop their feeling to belong to the group playing a game with the other group member, but it does not give indications on the pro-sociality of the group's members (as a public good game, a trust game or a dictator game would give). This should give the advantage of having a sense of belonging to the group and entitlement with the status that an exogenous manipulation (that is, random assignment of membership and status) may fail to give. At the same time, the typical problem of randomization of individual characteristics faced by endogenous manipulation are avoided since the membership to different group is still randomly assigned, and a possible difference between the groups in the performance of the coordination game would be just due to chance and so not being statistically significant (but still a powerful tool to induce status difference when participants receive a feedback on it). The comparison of the experimental results with the minimal status manipulation and with this new procedure will give insight on effectiveness of the new procedure in inducing status differences, overcoming the failure of feeling entitled with the status.