The Jurisdiction of the Man within – Introspection, Identity, and Cooperation in a Public Good Experiment

Engel, Christoph; Kurschilgen, Michael J.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2544579

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The Jurisdiction of the Man within – Introspection, Identity, and Cooperation in a Public Good Experiment

MPI Collective Goods Preprint, No. 2015/1

24 Pages Posted: 3 Jan 2015

See all articles by Christoph Engel

Christoph Engel

Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods; University of Bonn - Faculty of Law & Economics; Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR), Erasmus School of Law, Rotterdam Institute of Law and Economics, Students; Universität Osnabrück - Faculty of Law

Michael J. Kurschilgen

UniDistance Suisse; Max Planck Institute for Collective Goods

Date Written: January 2015

Abstract

According to Adam Smith (1790), human selfishness can be restrained by introspection. We test the effect of introspection on people’s willingness to cooperate in a public good game. Drawing on the concept of identity utility (George A. Akerlof and Rachel E. Kranton, 2000), we show theoretically that introspection may enhance cooperation by increasing the relative cost of deviating from one’s self-image. Experimentally, we induce introspection through the elicitation of (normative) expectations. Our results show that introspection causally increases cooperation. Both home-grown idealism and the experiences with the cooperativeness of the environment predict individual cooperativeness throughout the game.

Keywords: Experiment, Social Dilemma, Identity, Expectations, Introspection

JEL Classification: H41, D63, C90

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Engel, Christoph and Kurschilgen, Michael J., The Jurisdiction of the Man within – Introspection, Identity, and Cooperation in a Public Good Experiment (January 2015). MPI Collective Goods Preprint, No. 2015/1, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2544579 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2544579