M. Fernanda Rivas

An Experiment on Corruption and Gender

There exists evidence in the social science literature that women may be more relationship- oriented, may have higher standards of ethical behavior and may be more concerned with the common good than men are. This would imply that women are more willing to sacri.ce private pro.t for the public good, which would be especially important for political life. A number of papers with field data have found di¤erences in the corrupt activities of males and females, nonetheless they have drawbacks that may be overcome in a lab experiment. The aim of this paper is to see experimentally if women and men, facing the same situation behave in a di¤erent way, as suggested in the .eld-data studies or, on the contrary, they behave in the same way. The results found in the experiment show that women are indeed less corrupt than men.

Induced Negative Mood Increases Dictator Game Giving

The study examines the influence of induced negative mood on dictator game giving (DGG) with two recipients. Participants (N = 63) played the role of a dictator in a three-player dictator game. They could choose among two options: an altruistic option, where two receivers receive 10 Euros and the dictator himself receives nothing, or a selfish option, where the dictator himself receives 5 Euros and both receivers receive nothing. For half of the participants, the second option entailed that only one receiver receives nothing and the other receives 10 Euros. After four rounds, participants were randomly assigned to look at 10 pictures with either positive or negative emotional content with the purpose of inducing positive or negative mood. The results show that looking at pictures with negative emotional content increases anxiety and skin conductance and increases DGG in the remaining four rounds of the game. On the other hand, whether the selfish option would imply that one or both recipients receive nothing does not seem to have a strong influence on DGG. PsycINFO Classification code: 2340; 2360.

COOPERATION AND OPTIMISM IN A SOCIAL DILEMMA: Cooperation and Optimism in a Social Dilemma

We examine the influence of optimism about local and foreign people on social cooperation using a public goods game. Firstly, we find that optimism fuels social cooperation, and secondly, that this positive effect holds when optimism is focused either jointly or individually.

Response time and heart rate in a moral dilemma.

Is altruism the intuitive behavior in a moral dilemma? Or is selfishness the spontaneous behavior? To answer this question, a dictator game was played in which measures of response time and heart rates were taken with treatments that slightly differ only in the cost associated with the choice of a selfish responding. We find that neither altruism nor egoism is an intuitive process for everyone; rather, altruism is intuitive for altruistic subjects while egoism is intuitive for selfish subjects so that when these subjects are confronted with the choice of the opposite, less probable options, they become more reflective by taking longer time to respond. Lastly, during the decision period, a subject that is altruistic has a higher probability of experiencing an increase in the mean heart rate than a subject that is selfish.