Ricerc@Sapienza

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.