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Conscience Accounting: Emotion Dynamics and Social Behavior

Author

Listed:
  • Uri Gneezy

    (Rady School of Management, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093; and Center for Research in Experimental Economics and Political Decision Making (CREED), University of Amsterdam, 1018 WS Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

  • Alex Imas

    (Social Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213)

  • Kristóf Madarász

    (London School of Economics, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom)

Abstract

This paper presents theory and experiments where people's prosocial attitudes fluctuate over time following the violation of an internalized norm. We report the results of two experiments in which people who first made an immoral choice were then more likely to donate to charity than those who did not. In addition, those who knew that a donation opportunity would follow the potentially immoral choice behaved more unethically than those who did not know. We interpret this increase in charitable behavior as being driven by a temporal increase in guilt induced by past immoral actions. We term such behavior conscience accounting and discuss its importance in charitable giving and in the identification of social norms in choice behavior through time inconsistency.Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1942 . This paper was accepted by Teck-Hua Ho, behavioral economics .

Suggested Citation

  • Uri Gneezy & Alex Imas & Kristóf Madarász, 2014. "Conscience Accounting: Emotion Dynamics and Social Behavior," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 60(11), pages 2645-2658, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:60:y:2014:i:11:p:2645-2658
    DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2014.1942
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    emotion dynamics; bracketing; social norms; moral constraints; prosocial behavior;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D03 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Behavioral Microeconomics: Underlying Principles

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